A Bangladeshi maid in Saudi Arabia has claimed in a video posted online that her employers sexually abused her, doused her in hot oil and tied her up.

The woman posted a secretly filmed clip on social media in which she tearfully recounts her alleged abuse at the hands of her Saudi employers.

In the footage she made a desperate plea to be taken home and the housekeeper also said she had been assaulted, starved and locked up for 15 days.

Bangladesh called for the migrant worker to be repatriated from Saudi Arabia after her tearful video highlighted the exploitation faced by poor Asians working abroad.

Posted on Facebook and shared thousands of times, the woman alleged 'merciless sexual assaults' by her bosses and even held her scarred arms up to the camera.

'I perhaps won't live longer. Please save me. They locked me up for 15 days and barely gave me any food. They burned my hands with hot oil and tied me up,' the 25-year-old said.

The Bangladeshi housekeeper (left and right) made a heart-wrenching plea in a video posted on Facebook to be allowed to go home after claiming she was abused physically and mentally by her Saudi bosses

The heart-wrenching footage prompted protests in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, against worker conditions.

In the video, the woman is seen holding the phone close to her face as she apparently hides from her employers to secretly record her plea for help.

She added in the clip: 'They took me from one home to another one. In the first home, they tortured me and hit me repeatedly and then took me to another one where I experienced the same.

'I don't think I'm going to live. I think I'm going to die. They have beaten and tortured me. Please save me, just take me away from here.'

The woman is still living with her Saudi employer's in Jeddah and her phone has been confiscated, a representative from BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO that is trying to bring her home said.

Since 1991, some 300,000 Bangladeshi women have travelled to the Gulf nation to work, according to the ministry of expatriates' welfare.

Those workers account for the largest amount of wages sent home to Bangladesh.

The government in Dhaka last week called on the state-run manpower exporting agency to bring the woman back home 'as soon as possible'.

Her family in Bangladesh said they had been 'trying to get her back but couldn't'.

Activists form a human chain in Dhaka to protest and raise awareness for Bangladeshi female migrant workers that can face various forms of abuse, including physical, psychological and even sexual abuse by employers in Saudi Arabia. The protesters held up images from the Bangladeshi worker's video

Government spokesman Atiqur Rahman said Dhaka would crack down on rogue recruitment firms amid allegations that they abused female workers and sold them to other brokers.

But Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen his government would not ban women from going to Saudi Arabia for work.

'Saudi Arabia admitted some people are being victimised. But that is happening for a few handfuls of people. The Saudi government isn't making them victims,' he told reporters.

Her video came after the body of migrant worker Nazma Begum was repatriated in late October.

The 42-year-old Begum called her son Rajib Hossain repeatedly before her death, asking to be rescued and alleging torture, adding that she died of an untreated illness.

Both women said they were promised hospital janitor jobs but were tricked into being household maids.

Millions of Asians travel to the Gulf to work, according to Bangladesh's government, and human rights groups say many suffer exploitation and abuses with no channels for redress.

Bangladeshi migrant rights group Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program said last month that 61 percent of 110 women they interviewed who returned home, many from Saudi Arabia, claimed they were physically abused.

Some 14 per cent said they were sexually abused, the group added.

Dhaka-based BRAC, one of the world's largest charities, said this year alone, the bodies of 48 female workers were brought back from Saudi Arabia.