Hundreds of Rohingya men, women, and children have been held indefinitely for several years without charge inside a detention centre in Saudi Arabia.
Many members of the persecuted group came to Saudi Arabia after 2011 on fake passports to flee persecution in Myanmar and earn a living - but they were swept up in a series of crackdowns against undocumented workers, Middle East Eye can reveal.
During a four-month-long investigation, MEE has spoken to former and current detainees, alongside Rohingya living in Saudi Arabia, Bangladeshi refugee camps and activists, who confirmed that hundreds are being detained in the Gulf Kingdom.
Current detainees and those who fled to Bangladesh told MEE that many had spent between one to six years stuck inside the Shumaisi detention centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, unable to leave, and incarcerated for an indefinite period.
Upon arrival to the Gulf Kingdom, individuals with foreign passports are expected to give their fingerprints to Saudi immigration authorities. This system was introduced in 2010 to prevent foreigners overstaying and has meant Rohingya refugees are now registered with their fake passports.
Before this, when a Rohingya were detained in Shumaisi, local authorities would use locally recognised Rohingya groups to go into the detention centre to verify whether individuals were Rohingya.
But now, Rohingya with fake passports are misidentified as being citizens of a country they do not come from - meaning those who declare themselves as Rohingya following their detention in Shumaisi are arrested and forced to live inside the Shumaisi detention centre under the assumption that they are from the country where they obtained a fake passport.
The Shumaisi Detention Centre is a complex of buildings next to the Jeddah-Makkah expressway, covering more than 2.5 million square metres. Official Saudi government figures state that Shumaisi holds approximately 32,000 undocumented workers from various parts of the world.
There is no official reason given by the Saudi government as to why it is detaining so many Rohingya in Shumaisi, but detainees and activists believe it is because the Saudis have struggled to confirm whether they are Rohingya.