Chad probes adoption scam
2007-10-28 17:36
Abeche - Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage poor African children to leave their homes, children said on Sunday, as Chad probed an operation to ship out young children to live with families in Europe.
Aid workers caring for the children in Chad's eastern city of Abeche, where authorities detained nine French nationals on Thursday as they prepared to fly 103 children to France, said
the children's accounts had not yet been verified.
French charity "Zoe's Ark" promoted the scheme as offering a better life to orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, many of whose people have fled over the border to camps in Chad.
'We were well fed'
But some children said their parents were still alive and
they were taken from their villages on the Chad-Sudan border.
"My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were
playing some Chadians came and offered us sweets. They asked us to follow them to Adre and said afterwards they would take us home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre," said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.
"We spent seven days in Adre and I've been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents," he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.
France has condemned the operation and the Paris
prosecutor's office opened an investigation last week into
"illegal exercise of intermediary activities with the aim of adoption", but diplomats said they would face Chadian justice.
The seven members of the charter plane's crew, all Spanish citizens, are also being held by Chadian police.
A French diplomat has said around 300 families in France and
Belgium paid between $4 000-8 600 per child to
have them flown to an airport in Vatry, east of Paris, where
families hoping to welcome them waited in vain on Thursday.
France's Foreign Ministry issued a warning about Zoe's Ark in August, saying there was no guarantee the children were helpless orphans and casting doubt on the project's legality.