JIZAN: A Saudi couple who recently found 13-year-old Khaled Zarqan Ali from Jizan, who has been living in orphanages in Yemen for eight months after seemingly being deported by mistake, has told how they discovered his presence. Ibrahim Hussein Sha'bi told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that they were visiting relatives in Yemen when his wife, by chance, met a Yemeni woman working at the orphanage who told her of a Saudi boy who was brought there a month earlier. “The woman told her that the boy claimed to be from the village of Al-Hima in Jizan,” Sha'bi said. “He had been admitted to the orphanage along with a Yemeni boy after they were deported from the Kingdom with a group of illegal immigrants.” The orphanage, he said, was in the west coast town of Al-Hodeidah, not the capital Sana'a as originally reported. “My wife began gathering all the information she could on the boy and where he was from, and finally tracked down Khaled's family through a friend working at the governorate of Dhamad,” he said. “She was told that Khaled had been reported missing.” The Yemeni woman who informed Sha'bi's wife about Khaled, Sabah Al-Ahdal, told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that he had arrived at the Al-Hodeidah orphanage a month earlier, having previously been kept at a care home in Haradh on the border with Saudi Arabia. “The boy kept insisting he was a Saudi and from Al-Hima in Jizan,” she said. “They had deported him because they thought he was from Somalia.” She said that Khaled was in perfectly good health, but continues to ask for his family back home. Khaled's grandparents, with whom he had been living when he went missing, said they were hopeful he would be returned home soon, but that they were unable to make the trip to Al-Hodeidah for financial reasons. “I'm confident that the Saudi Embassy in Yemen will get him back to us as soon as possible,” his grandfather said, adding that the family should be “compensated for what they have been through”. Saudi Gazette reported Wednesday that the embassy in Yemen had begun investigating the issue. Ahmad Al-Hamdan, the Saudi Ambassador to Yemen, said that officials were investigating the veracity of the details and seeking to take the boy's father to Yemen to collect his son. Khaled had last been seen playing near his house over eight months ago. All efforts to find him failed, and the family had no news of his fate until last week when relatives informed his grandparents that he had been found in Al-Hodeidah. Jizan Police and Border Guard said that all deportation procedures are carried out by the Passports Department.
