Two students of the Federal
University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO), who attended an international table
tennis competition in Croatia, have ended up in a Bosnian refugee camp.
Abia Uchenna and Eboh Chinedu,
the students, arrived in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, on November 12, for the
fifth world inter-university championships held in the country.
According to UK Guardian, the
Nigerian students had participated in the competition and were preparing to
return to Lagos via Istanbul, Turkey, on November 18 when they were arrested.
On the night before their
departure, the 18-year-old table tennis players decided to take a walk around
the country’s capital but they were apprehended by police officers who
requested their documents.
Chinedu was quoted as saying
attempts to explain to the officers that their documents were in the hostel
where they had planned to pass the night yielded no result as they were
detained in a van over the assumption that they were illegal immigrants.
“We tried to explain who we were
and that our documents were in the hostel, but they took us to a police
station. They paid no attention to what we were saying,” he said.
The officers later transferred
the students to the country’s Bosnia-Herzegovina border, where Croatian
authorities had gathered a group of illegal migrants attempting to cross into
the country.
Police ordered the group to move
through the woods and into Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a threat that “they would
shoot those who refuse”.
“I refused to go into the woods.
The officer told me he would shoot me if I didn’t move,” Chinedu said.
The two Nigerian students joined
a host of illegal immigrants who moved into Bosnia-Herzegovina and ended up in
a camp in Velika Kladuša, where thousands of migrants were stuck in tents.
It was until the end of November
that the camp volunteers assisted Uchenna and Chinedu in contacting
representatives of the table-tennis competition to tell them of the students
whereabouts.
Alberto Tanghetti, organiser of
the table tennis competition, expressed surprise, wondering why the police
officers deported the students to a refugee camp.
He said the officers should have
accompanied the students to the hostel for confirmation of identification
documents.
“They told me two students from
Nigeria were taken to Bosnia by Croatian police, I asked them to send me photos
and their names. After careful verification, we confirmed that those boys had
participated in the tournament and had regular visas, issued by the Croatian
authorities. I really don’t understand what happened, because even the police
in Pula were notified that they were here,” he said.
“It is even more absurd that no
one believed the boys when they tried to explain to the police officers that
they had regular visas. It would have sufficed to accompany them to the hostel
to verify that they had entered Croatia legally.”
The Croatian ministry of interior
confirmed that the Nigerians had regular visas and entered the country legally
but claimed that the students were making an attempt to remain in the country.
The ministry also said the
students had checked out from the hostel before being stopped by the police.
But there was no explanation of
why the police officers deported the students to the Bosnian refugee camp,
knowing that the students had entered the country with a flight to Zagreb and
not from Bosnia.
The Croatian authorities have
often been accused of illegally sending migrants trying to cross the border
back to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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