WikiLeaks: Saudis tried to shield students from US scandal

CAIRO (AP) — A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom's diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved.

The cheating was discovered — and the staffer was fired — following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos reveal for the first time that the students were almost all Saudis and that their government booked them flights home following a meeting between college administrators and Saudi diplomats in Washington just before the scandal broke.

The memo goes on to say that an unidentified diplomat at the embassy subsequently "issued travel tickets to those students ... to return to the kingdom so they don't face jail or deportation by the American authorities."

Reached by phone at his home in Butte, Montana, the college's Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs Douglas Abbott told The Associated Press the Saudi Embassy's account of the meeting sounded accurate.

Scores of Saudi students — many of them sponsored by their embassy's cultural section or the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. — attend the college every year to study for degrees in fields like petroleum engineering.

Officials first noticed transcript alterations on Oct. 25, 2011, and irregularities piled up as the school began digging, according to a statement read out by Abbott during a meeting on Jan. 26, 2012 and later posted to YouTube.

Abbott confirmed information in the Saudi memos which stated that seven students had returned to the college, including at least two who said their grades had been changed without their knowledge — unusual incidents which neither Abbott nor the memo explained in any further detail.

The embassy has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the massive cache of diplomatic memos made public by WikiLeaks on Friday, although a recent statement carried by the official Saudi news agency appears to acknowledge that the memos paint an accurate picture of the kingdom's diplomats and their activities abroad.