Chad Charges Aid Workers With Kidnapping

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Six French charity workers have been charged with kidnapping after a failed attempt to leave Chad with 103 children the aid organization said were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region, authorities said Tuesday.

If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison with hard labor, said Interior Minister Ahmat Bachir.

Three French journalists and a seven-member flight crew were expected to be charged with complicity, Justice Minister Pahimi Padacket Albert said. Two of the journalists were covering the operation and a third was apparently present for personal reasons, according to the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.

Authorities in Chad detained 17 Europeans after the French charity tried to put the children on a plane last week. UNICEF France has said most of the children appear to be from Chad, not Sudan, and did not seem to be orphans, although France's Foreign Ministry said their origins were unclear.

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 and Chad had a judicial agreement 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.

French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani said Tuesday that France was sending a doctor and legal adviser to meet with the group's detained members.

Asked how the group could have made such detailed arrangements without the government being aware, Andreani said: "We are not in a police state. We do not control the comings and goings of everyone."

"We understand the desire of aid groups (to help people), but let's do it in a reasonable manner," she said.

Andreani said the origin of the children was still not clear, as well as whether they were in fact orphans. She said France would decide whether to request extradition of the group's members after Chadian judicial officials ruled on the case.

Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for the the group, said the charges against his clients were less severe than he had feared, given harsh comments by President Idriss Deby.

"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 did not mention the Belgian.

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.

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Associated Press writers Daniel Woolls in Madrid and Jean-Pierre Verges in Paris contributed to this report.

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