A long nightmare for two students from Nigeria is finally over. Kenneth Eboh (second from left) and Uchenna Abia (third from left) are headed home after a month in both limbo and hell. Abia, 18, and Eboh, 29, are students at Nigeria's Owerri Technical University. Last month, they traveled to Croatia to represent their school at an international table tennis tournament. Their visas were arranged by the university in Pula which hosted the tournament, and they had round-trip tickets on Turkish Airlines to return November 18. After the tournament, they had a few days to enjoy the sights in Zagreb. They did see much before their view was obscured by the interior walls of a police station. "They said that 'you are from Bosnia, you have to go to Bosnia,'" Mr. Eboh told BBC News. The Croatian police refused to check their paperwork, which they had left at their hostel. The next thing they knew, Eboh and Abia were forced into the back of a van headed for the Bosnian border, where they were ordered out at gunpoint into the freezing woods at night. "We don't know the reason why they sent us to another country at midnight... and they forced us to go through the bush," said Mr. Eboh. "We didn't have any choice because they tried to shoot us." Once across the border to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the two students found life-saving succor at a refugee camp. There, they endured sub-freezing temperatures with no running water while the three nations involved pointed fingers at each other and nothing got done. "We want to go back to Nigeria," Mr. Eboh pleaded after three weeks in the camp. "Please, help us, send us home immediately." At long last, the Nigerian embassy in Budapest arranged for their travel home. On Friday, they boarded a Turkish Airlines flight home via Istanbul, over a month later than scheduled. The Croatian police, for their part, continue to deny any wrongdoing, claiming the two students voluntarily deported themselves. "The Croatian police did not take any action towards these persons nor did it deport them," they told The Guardian. There appears little hope that the Croatian police will accept any responsibility for its actions, let alone apologize to the two students whose lives were so violently threatened. Nonetheless, their story has reached one of the better possible conclusions, their post-traumatic stress notwithstanding. On this, the shortest day of the year, there was a glimmer of light as the two young men finally returned home.

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