Seven Europeans Freed In Chad Kidnapping Case

N'DJAMENA, Chad — Seven Europeans among 17 detained for over a week in an alleged attempt to kidnap 103 African children were released yesterday and left the country with President Sarkozy of France.

It was the second time since taking office in May that the French leader has intervened in a major international legal dispute.

The Europeans — among them nine French citizens — were arrested October 25 when a charity calling itself Zoe's Ark was stopped from flying the children to Europe. The group said the children were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region where more than 200,000 have died in conflict since 2003. It said it intended to place them with host families.

However, France's Foreign Ministry and others have cast doubt on the group's claims. Aid workers who interviewed the children said Thursday most of them had been living with adults they considered their parents and came from villages on the Chadian-Sudanese border region.

The 17 originally detained included six French charity workers, three French journalists, and the crew of the plane that the group planned to use to take the children to France. The crew was made up of Spaniards and a Belgian pilot. The six charity workers have been charged with kidnapping and are still in detention. The other four — three Spanish crew and the Belgian pilot of the plane — are being held on accessory charges.

Later yesterday, French television channel M–6 aired a documentary raising further suspicions about how the charity group operated. The footage, shot by cameraman Marc Garmirian of the Paris-based Capa Presse agency, shows one charity worker haphazardly screening children brought by tribal elders to the group's center in eastern Chad. Speaking through translators, she demands neither details nor even the most basic documentation or verification.

Asked if she could be mistaken on even the most basic facts — such as whether the individual children were Chadian or Sudanese or whether they were indeed orphans — she readily acknowledges she could be wrong.