Please read what follows and beware out there, especially with your passport.
--Emilie
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This is from The St. Petersburg Times of January 19 -25.
There is a picture of sorrow of our brothers and sisters at
the site.  The address is:

http://www.spb.ru/times/current/cameroon.html

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Cameroon Student Could Be Deported

By Yevgenia Borisova
STAFF WRITER

A group of stranded language students from Cameroon
has found one of their number they thought was lost - he
is in police custody and facing deportation for not being
in possession of his passport during a document check.

Aabong Nkafuthe, the student who is facing deportation,
was detained in late December.

His compatriots were only alerted to his whereabouts this
week when police informed an intermediary that he was in
custody.

To get out of custody Nkafuthe needs his passport.

But the last time that most of the 10 students saw their
passports was when they handed them over to the AKC
educational center, which had collected $5,000 from them
in return for promising to arrange Russian lessons for them.

Nkafuthe and his nine compatriots' problems began last
summer when they came to St. Petersburg looking to study
Russian and professional skills and enrolled at the AKC
educational center.

On doing so, they submitted installment payments toward
their $1,000 tuition and surrendered their passports to the
center's director, Igor Aksarin, who said he would register
them with OVIR and give them student visas.

Aksarin took their money and documents and issued each
a spravka, a replacement document indicating their passports
were being registered with authorities, that they could show
police in the event of a document check.

Meanwhile, a city official has said that AKC was never
licensed to teach Russian language classes in the first place.

According to Galina Sokolova, head of the licensing
department of the City Hall Educational Committee, the
AKC center was only licensed to teach English.

In October, having gone to just four Russian classes, the
students decided to stop attending the school until their
passports were given back.

Five of the students' visas and passports turned up at OVIR
late last month - with visas that expired on Dec. 31. Two of
the students, who were registered in Pushkin, are holding their
passports. But three of the passports have yet to be located.

Among those three is Nkafuthe's - and unless his passport turns
up, the authorities say he should be sent back to Cameroon.

"To release him we need to identify him. We need his passport,"
said Alexander Lobanov, head of the OVIR deportation
department. "If he is here without a visa, he should be deported."

Lobanov added that any of the other students that do not have
valid passports should receive the same treatment, adding that,
any deportees would have to pay for their own deportations or
have them funded by the Cameroon Embassy in Moscow.

He also said the special police unit dealing with crimes committed
by and against foreigners, which has been investigating the
case, had found no wrongdoing on AKC's behalf.

"They did not find any crime had been committed against
[the students]," he said.

"They had a license to educate and that's enough."

Lobanov had no comment when he was told the 10 students -
including the one in custody - had been given OVIR-validated
spravkas by Aksarin. He also would not comment when told
that Aksarin had admitted that he had been holding some of the
passports since the summer.

"We recommended [the students] apply to the court," Lobanov said.

He did say that two of Aksarin's students, whose visas had
inexplicably been issued in Pushkin, a suburb of St. Petersburg,
could stay.

Of those who were issued visas that expired on Dec. 31, he said
that "the question of whether they may stay here is under
discussion."

Aksarin has told The St. Petersburg Times many versions of the fate
of the passports. In one interview, he said he would not
return the students their passports until they paid their full tuition.

On other occasions he said he was never given the passports; or
that some of the students had given AKC their passports too
late, while he was holding onto the others in his office for fear their
owners would flee to the West.

On Wednesday, in an interview at his office, he said that three of
the 10 students had given him their passports in October.

When asked, however, why those three students had been issued
spravkas that expired in September, he said, "I don't remember
exactly when [they came], but it was after a month after they came
to St. Petersburg."

When asked, he could not produce any records of the dates on
which the students had given him their documents.