Charity Workers Jailed in Chad Sent Home

Six French charity workers sentenced to eight years' hard labor for trying to take more than 100 children out of Chad to France were flown home today.

Reporters at N'Djamena airport saw the four men and two women from the Zoe's Ark charity board the plane operated by Chad's national airline, Toumai Air Tchad.

France's justice ministry confirmed that the group was in the process of being sent back.

The six were found guilty of attempted child kidnap and fraud on Wednesday for trying to remove the children, who they claimed were Darfur war orphans.

France had asked Chad to send home the workers so they could serve their jail terms in France under the terms of a bilateral judicial agreement. France's justice minister, Rachida Dati, formally requested this yesterday.

Zoe's Ark had said it was helping to rescue orphans from Darfur across Chad's eastern border.

But most of the 103 children were found to have come from families in Chadian border villages who were persuaded to give up the infants with promises of education at local centers.

The operation had not been approved by any government, and its discovery created a scandal which threatened diplomatic relations between France and Chad, a former French colony, as well as complicating the work of bona fide aid workers in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

Zoe's Ark insisted during the trial that its workers had acted out of humanitarian concern and wanted to give the children of Darfur a better life. Celine Lorenzon, a lawyer for the six, called the sentence "a judicial masquerade."

UN agencies established that most of the 103 children Zoe's Ark was planning to fly out were not Darfur orphans, but came from villages in Chad where they lived with at least one parent or close adult relative.

While transported by the group, some of the fit and healthy children had been dressed with fake bandages to look ill. Families from villages on Chad's border with Sudan said they entrusted their children to the charity workers because they had no local schools and were told their children would be educated at a project in a nearby Chad town.

When the workers and the children were stopped by police near a freight airport in eastern Chad, more than 300 members of would-be "foster families" were waiting at an airport in France to collect the children. All of the eight convicted were ordered to pay a combined 4.12bn CFA francs (€6.3m, or £4.6m) to the families of the 103 children in the affair.

The group's charismatic leader, Eric Breteau, recruited the French "foster families" online and had delivered rousing speeches to them in regional meetings. On the last day of the trial he continued to insist he had done no wrong nor broken any law.