It must have sounded like a wonderful adventure. Kenneth Eboh, 29, and Uchenna Abia, 18, both students at Owerri Technical University in Nigeria, qualified to represent their school at the World InterUniversities Championships in Pula, Croatia. On November 12, the two students flew Turkish Airlines to Zagreb before heading three hours west to Pula. On November 16, after the tournament, they returned from Pula to Zagreb, scheduled to fly home via Istanbul on November 18. They checked into a hostel and set out to explore Zagreb, leaving their visas and airline tickets behind. As they exited a tram, they were accosted by Croatian police with no probable cause for any wrongdoing. "They took us to the police station," said Chinedu. "We tried to explain who we were and that we had left our documents in the hostel. They didn't pay attention to what we were saying." Things quickly went from bad to worse for the visiting student athletes. Suspected of being illegal immigrants, they were forced to sign documents they did not understand. Then, they were driven to the Bosnian border and forced out into the freezing woods at gunpoint. "I refused to go into the woods," Chinedu recalled. "The officer told me he would shoot me if I didn't move." Out in the cold, the two managed to find a refugee camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, they found help from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which runs the Miral Camp near Velika Kladusa. While their case has attracted international attention, and there is no question that they were in Croatia legally, the two students remain in legal limbo. Their legitimate Croatian visas expired on November 18, they day they were scheduled to fly home. Now, almost three weeks after their wrongful arrest and deportation, Kenneth Chinedu and Abie Uchenna Alexandra remain in the sub-freezing temperatures at the Miral Camp with no running water, living among the migrants they were suspected of being. The Croatian police have yet to issue an explanation of their actions, let alone an apology.

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