Europeans charged with child abduction

Nine French and seven Spanish nationals have been charged with fraud and abducting 103 children from Chad.The 16 Europeans were arrested on Thursday as they tried to fly the children out of Abeche in eastern Chad. A Belgian pilot was detained separately but was not cited in Tuesday's charges.The French citizens, from a group called Zoe's Ark, have denied wrongdoing. They claim their charity wanted to place the 103 orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur with European families.But United Nations and French officials said it appeared many of the children, aged three to ten years old, were from Chad and many were not orphans.Seven Spanish crew members of the plane chartered for the operation were charged as accessories, along with two Chadians.A Chadian prosecutor said the French face five to 20 years hard labour if convicted in the landlocked African state.Despite the embarrassment caused by the case, France said it did not expect its longstanding ties with its former colony to be hurt.Paris has troops stationed in Chad and will provide roughly half of a European Union peacekeeping force to be deployed shortly in Chad's violent eastern region.Spain's government disagreed with the charges against the Spanish aircrew, saying there was no conclusive evidence.Chadian President Idriss Deby has demanded stiff penalties. He has suggested the children could have ended up being sold to a paedophile ring or used to supply human organs.French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he had spoken to Deby by telephone and assured him that his government condemned the activities of the Zoe's Ark group."We'll try to reach agreement so that no one loses face in this affair," he said.French officials did not see the scandal affecting the EU deployment in Chad to protect 400,000 Sudanese and Chadian refugees who have fled violence spilling over from Darfur.Journalists who were allowed to see and film, but not talk to, the detained French and Spanish held in Abeche's law courts building, said they looked stressed, tired and dishevelled.At least two French journalists are among the detained.The children were due to have been flown to Europe to live with host families who paid several thousand euros each.Some of the children said their parents were still alive and they were lured from their villages on the Chad-Sudan border with offers of sweets and biscuits.They are now being looked after at an Abeche orphanage by UN children's agency (UNHCR) officials who were trying to establish where they came from.Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for Zoe's Ark, accused Chad's government of using the situation for political ends.© Independent Television News Limited 2007. All rights reserved.

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ITN | October 30, 2007

Tags:. .evidence. .supply. .african. .separately. .denied