CHAD: Lawyers apply for bail for six humanitarian activists being held on child abduction charges in Chad

Lawyers in Chad applied for bail on Thursday (November 8) on behalf of six humanitarian activists held in Chad on child abduction charges. They were arrested two weeks ago trying to fly 103 African children to Europe. "We have .. requested for each of the six French people in detention to be freed. The judge has 10 days to give his decision. The interpreter, who is in effect the one who denounced everybody, was forced to admit that when he was translating he indeed said that they were children who came from Darfur. If that is true, it is he who has deceived everybody," Mario Stasi, one of their defence lawyers, told reporters outside the law courts in Chad's capital N'Djamena. The six are members of Zoe's Ark, a French organisation which has said the children were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region, across Chad's eastern border. The investigating judge met on Thursday the Zoe's Ark suspects and a Chadian suspect who worked as their interpreter. U.N. officials say almost all of the children came from villages on the border and had at least one living parent. French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew in on Sunday to pick up three French journalists and four Spanish air stewardesses who had been charged as accessories to the crimes. Three male members of the Spanish air crew and a Belgian pilot remain in custody on the same charges, along with several Chadians. Relatives of the six French detainees met Sarkozy in Paris for about an hour on Thursday. Sarkozy's spokesman David Martinon said in a statement the president had "expressed confidence in the justice system and stressed that it should be allowed to work calmly and in full respect of Chadian sovereignty." The accused face up to 20 years in jail with hard labour if convicted in Chad. They would receive lesser sentences in France and Paris has suggested activating a judicial cooperation deal between the two countries that might permit their extradition.

ITN Source | November 9, 2007

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