Abia, 18, and Eboh, 29, say they were not intending to settle in Europe. They are both students at the Federal University of Technology Owerri in Nigeria. They entered Croatia legally in November to participate in an international sports competition for university students in Pula, an ancient city on the Croatian coast.
After being knocked out early in the tournament, the pair say they decided to make the most of their visa by visiting Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
On their last night, they were arrested by police while on an evening stroll, and accused of entering the country illegally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country to Croatia's south.
"We said: What is Bosnia?" Eboh said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "We thought they were joking."
But the police were very serious. Officers refused to let the two men fetch their passports from their hotel. The next day, police drove them to a forest next to the Bosnian border, forcing them at gunpoint to walk south into Bosnia alongside a group of Pakistanis, Eboh said.
"They said: 'You go Bosnia, go, go,'" said Eboh. "I said: 'Go where? I'm not from Bosnia.' But he brought up his gun and said he would shoot me."
A representative of for the Croatian Interior Ministry did not reply to a request for comment. The ministry has previously said officials do not know how the Nigerians ended up in northern Bosnia.
But the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. department that gave assistance to the Nigerians in Bosnia, reviewed the men's documents and confirmed that their Croatian visas were valid until December 3. Records provided by the tournament organisers show they both participated in the table tennis competition.
The incident has highlighted the often violent ways with which European governments have sought to avoid a repeat of the European migration crisis in 2015, when more than a million people made it to Europe without a visa.
Most traveled from Turkey to Greece, before heading to northern Europe via Hungary.
But a deal between the European Union and Turkey has persuaded Turkish officials to make it harder to reach Greece. In turn, Greece has placed greater restrictions on those hoping to leave its northern borders.
With Hungary erecting a fence along its border with Serbia, the primary migration trail north has shifted westward, through Bosnia and Croatia.
And to throttle movement still further, the Croatian government has employed a policy of violent nighttime deportations, seizing many migrants suspected of entering the country from Bosnia and forcing them back across the border without letting them apply for asylum.
In interviews in Bosnia this week with dozens of migrants, residents and aid workers, a consistent picture has emerged of migrants being beaten, robbed and deported without due process from Croatia to Bosnia.
"Whenever we ask anyone what happens, everyone says the same," said Semra Okanovic, a Bosnian government doctor who works with Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid group, to treat wounded migrants in northern Bosnia. "They get beaten, their telephones broken, their money stolen. Some of them have their arms broken. Some say their clothes are stolen and pushed in the river."
A third Nigerian, Sunday Awojobi, interviewed in northern Bosnia on Wednesday, said he had been deported in a similar fashion to the two table tennis players.
Awojobi had a visa valid until March 2020, and a stamp in his passport showed that he had entered Croatia legally on Nov. 9.
After an international outcry about their fate, the two table tennis players have been confined inside a government-run center in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, while the Bosnian and Croatian governments debate who should take responsibility for them.
Their mobile phones were confiscated, meaning they can only be contacted by the center's landline.
"We have been locked up and it's not fair — we are human beings," said Eboh.
Abia added, "You have to take us away from here."
Written by: Patrick Kingsley
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
