Europeans charged with kidnap

2007-10-30 07:28

Sonia Rolley

Abeche - A judge in Chad late on Monday charged 16 Europeans with kidnapping or complicity after a charity attempted to fly more than 100 children to France, according the prosecutor's office.

Nine French nationals - members of the charity Zoe's Ark or journalists - were formally charged with "kidnapping of minors with the aim of compromising their civil status" and "swindling", said an official in this eastern town.

Seven Spanish members of the plane's flight crew who were to have flown the 103 children out of the country were charged with complicity.

All 16 were arrested just as the plane was due to take off from Abeche, 700km east of the capital, N'Djamena, last Thursday.

A Belgian pilot who was also arrested was being held in N'Djamena and could be charged separately.

Itno promises 'severe punishment'

The prosecutor had also called for two Chadian nationals to be charged, but there was no word on them.

The French nationals had organised an airlift, which they said was aimed at taking 103 orphans from the civil war in Sudan's western province of Darfur to France.

A judicial source said authorities were preparing to transfer the Europeans to the capital "for reasons of security" and because there was no proper court at Abeche.

President Idriss Deby Itno had promised "severe punishment" for what he had called a "kidnapping" or "child trafficking", suggesting the group planned to sell the children to paedophiles or "kill them and remove their organs".

The incident had strained ties with former colonial power, France, which had 1 000 troops based in the central African nation and was banking on its support for a European peacekeeping deployment near the Darfur border.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Deby on Sunday to denounce the operation as "illegal and unacceptable".

Aid workers trace kids' background

The children, aged one to 10, were reportedly to be adopted or fostered by families who each paid $4 000 to $8 600 allegedly to cover evacuation costs.

They were taken into care in an orphanage in Abeche, where aid workers were trying to trace their background.

United Nations children's agency, Unicef, said after interviewing the children that most appeared to be Chadian and not from Darfur and there was no evidence they were orphans.

Eastern Chad was home to some 236 000 cross-border refugees from Darfur as well as some 173 000 people displaced by a local rebellion.

Chad's backing was crucial to European Union plans to begin deployment of a 4 000-strong force in Chad and the Central African Republic next month, to tackle the refugee crisis sparked by fighting in Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region.

Deby assured Sarkozy that the charity affair would not affect the Darfur force, according to France's junior foreign minister Rama Yade.

But in France, a lawyer for Zoe's Ark accused N'Djamena of exploiting the case as a "bargaining chip" during talks on the deployment.

- AFP