Nigerian students experience a nightmare in Croatia

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Shortly before Nigerian students Eboh Kenneth Chinedu and Abia Uchenna Alexandro were deported from Croatia and forced to enter Bosnia and Herzegovina, they were told to sign documents written in Croatian. “The van stopped. They had us get out, and then a Croatian officer said, ‘Sign!’ I said that I wouldn’t sign something I couldn’t read. Then the policeman pulled out a gun and told me he’d shoot me if I didn’t. I was scared, so I signed it.”

That is what Eboh Kenneth told a journalist from the Bosnian website Zurnal had happened when he and his classmate were deported to Bosnia under threat of deadly bodily harm. He says after they signed the documents, Bosnian police took their money and forced them to cross the border through a path in the woods. Eboh Kenneth says there were also a number of migrants in the group. Eventually, they ended up in the Miral refugee camp in Velika Kladusa.

Their vacation plans were originally quite different. The two men, along with two other students and a professor from the Federal University of Technology Owerri, embarked on their journey as part of the Nigerian table tennis team at the 5th World InterUniversities Championships (WIUSC) — a kind of college Olympics — in the coastal city of Pula, from November 13-17. Their plan was to visit the Croatian capital, Zagreb, after the tournament and then fly back home to Nigeria, via Istanbul.

For Eboh Kenneth and Abia Uchenna, however, things took a very different turn. They say that after they arrived in their hostel in the capital, they dropped off their belongings and went out to see the city. They also left their passports in the hostel. In the city, they were approached by police at a streetcar stop and then taken to the police station. They say none of their explanations of who they were and why they were in Croatia helped. They were then thrown in a van with several migrants and driven to the Croatian-Bosnian border. That is where they were threatened and told to leave the country.

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