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Contrary to news making the rounds that Ghanaian Muslims who embarked on this year�s pilgrimage to Mecca were arriving on schedule, information available to the Ghanaian Observer (GO) indicates that over 500 of the pilgrims are currently stranded in Medina, Saudi Arabia. �It is not true that we are not stranded. We are stranded�if we are not stranded why are we still in Medina after nine days�everybody spends only three days in Medina. The assurance from government is that we are going to be transported back to Ghana by December 11, 2009; now if on the 17th December and we are still in Medina, then anybody who tells you that we are not stranded is either playing politics with it or is not being honest with us here,� a distraught pilgrim told The GO. The pilgrim, who spoke on condition of anonymity, is one of 360 Ghanaians stranded in Medina who were transported from Mecca on December 9, 2009 to Medina to be subsequently transported to Ghana latest by December 11. This information reaching GO exposes the desperate denials from government officials and the National Hajj Committee that hundreds of Ghanaians who embarked on this year�s Hajj pilgrimage are not stranded. However, GO can report that days after the official completion of the Hajj, over 360 Ghanaian pilgrims still remain stranded in Medina, with over 200 more from Mecca preparing to join their brothers and sister in Medina in the next few days, while their travel agents fight for flights to bring them back home. Further checks by GO have also indicated that hundreds of anxious family relatives back home on regular basis throng the Kotoka International Airport (KAI) in anticipation of welcoming their relatives back home from the holy pilgrimage. Further checks by GO have revealed that the over 360 pilgrims currently in Medina have limited or no access to food, water and basic social amenities. The situation is expected to be exacerbated in the coming days as more than 200 pilgrims who were left in Mecca are expected to join their Muslims counterparts to come home. Speaking from Medina, a number of stranded Ghanaian Muslins told GO that after they performed the pilgrimage, they were transported from Mecca to Medina last week Wednesday 9 December 2009 with the assurance that they will be brought back to Ghana by 11th December, 2009. According to them, with this assurance of arrival in Ghana by 11th December, 2009, �almost everybody started spending his or her money on other things such as shopping. So by 11th December, none of us was having something on us�we had finished spending our money. In the past, the Ghanaian Hajj has been fraught with problems, with many pilgrims often having to return home even after paying huge sums of money to agents. Pilgrims had to sleep in the open and went for days without observing serious personal hygiene and exposed to the activities of criminals because of the lack of any form of security.