KATHMANDU: Around 20 Nepali students have been stranded in St Lucia, an island nation in the North America, for over a year, while they are fighting a legal battle against a local institution.

The Nepali youth are hopeful that they would win the case very soon and could come back home safe very soon.

Local St Lucia Times reports on Wednesday that the students have expected support from the new Prime Minister Allen Chastanet for their justice.

The report quotes one of the victims Bikash Bhurtel as saying that they were taken to the island state by the Lambirds Academy with a false promise of education and jobs in the United States.

"The students claim that after each paying huge sums of money which they had borrowed from persons back home to come here to get Hospitality Study degrees, they realised that Lambirds Academy, which boasted a campus in the North of Saint Lucia, had ripped them off."

While many of such students have already returned home, around 20 including himself are waiting the verdict over the protracted court case, according to Bhurtel.

Now, the students want the court order that the Academy pay them back the money it deceivingly received.

Meanwhile, Bhurtel has lamented that with the one-year visas expired, the local authority has confiscated their passports and banned them from work.

However, the government gives food and accommodation to the students, Bhurtel maintains.

He is now hopeful as "before becoming Prime Minister, Chastanet had visited the students when they were housed at the Pastoral Centre at Marisule, to hear their concerns."