French Nationals Charged With Kidnapping
By Dany Padire
Associated Press Writer
October 30, 2007
CBNNews.com - N'DJAMENA, Chad -- Six French nationals have been charged with kidnapping after a failed attempt to fly from Chad with 103 children a charity said were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region, authorities said Tuesday.
Interior Minister Ahmat Bachir said that, if they were found guilty, they would face up to 20 years in prison with hard labor. Prisoners in Chad are often put to work for the state.
A judge in the eastern city of Abeche also agreed late Monday to allow prosecution charges of complicity against three French journalists, Justice Minister Pahimi Padacket Albert said. Two of the journalists were covering the operation and a third was reportedly present for personal reasons, according to the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.
A seven-person flight crew also would be charged with complicity, he told The Associated Press. The accused would be flown this week to the capital N'Djamena.
Authorities in Chad detained 17 people - nine of them French - after the French charity tried to put the children on a plane last week.
Zoe's Ark
L'Arche de Zoe, or Zoe's Ark, said it had arranged French host families for the children to save them from possible death in Sudan's western Darfur region. More than four years of conflict there has left more than 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced - many to eastern Chad.
French Justice Minister Rachida Dati said France had a judicial agreement with Chad that would enable the African country to return the six to France to face trial, but added that Chad had not yet chosen to do so.
Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for the group, said the charges against his clients were less severe than he had feared, given harsh comments by President Idriss Deby about them.
"Now we are going to work with Chadian lawyers and contest all the elements against them, one by one," he said. "We are entering difficult territory, but one that is now clearly defined."
Seven Spanish citizens who work for a Barcelona-based charter airline also were detained in the case, as was a pilot from Belgium, the two countries said. The Chad justice minister made no mention of the Belgian citizen, whose legal status in the country wasn't known.
UNICEF's representative in Chad, Mariam Coulibaly Ndiaye, said authorities were interviewing the children Monday to learn more about their origins and whether they were truly orphans.
Charity Kidnapping?
Deby denounced it as a "straightforward kidnapping" and promised punishment for those involved. French authorities also have condemned the charity's plans.
Chad has assured France that a debacle over a charity's effort to spirit children out of the country will not affect plans to deploy European Union peacekeepers there to protect refugees from neighboring Darfur, a French official said Monday.
In France, police searched the charity's offices as well as the apartment of its founder as part of an inquiry into whether the group broke adoption laws, police officials said. The group initially promised some families that they could adopt - not merely host - children from Darfur, French officials have said.
French diplomats said they had warned Zoe's Ark for months not to go through with its plans. Christophe Letien, spokesman for the charity, insisted its intentions were merely humanitarian.
"The team is made up of firemen, doctors and journalists," he said at a news conference. "It's unimaginable that doubts are being cast on these people of good faith, who volunteered to save children from Darfur."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted during his conversation with Deby that the journalists' status must be respected, the Foreign Ministry said.
Herve Chabalier, who runs the CAPA TV agency, said that reporter Marc Garmirian was just there doing his job and criticized the charges against the journalists.
"Obviously I am distraught, because the last news we had last night suggested that a distinction would finally be made" (between the journalists and volunteers of the charity), Chabalier told France Info radio.
Associated Press writers Daniel Woolls in Madrid and Jean-Pierre Verges in Paris contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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