June 22, 2015 1:13 pm • By MAGGIE MICHAEL and RAPHAEL SATTER

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 students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee.

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.

A Saudi memo describing the meeting, dated Feb. 3, 2012 and labeled "Secret / Urgent," says it was Montana Tech Chancellor Donald Blackketter who floated the idea of flying the students out of the United States. 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."