Six French charity workers convicted in Chad of attempting to kidnap 103 children flew out of the central African country yesterday to serve out their sentences in France.
They were led in handcuffs to a Boeing 737 owned by Toumai Air Tchad after being taken to the airport from their cells in the capital Ndjamena and took off at about 1.40pm.
The members of L'Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark) were convicted on Wednesday of attempted abduction for having tried to fly children to France, claiming they were war orphans from the Sudanese region of Darfur which borders eastern Chad.
They were each sentenced to eight years' hard labor, while a Chadian and a Sudanese who worked as intermediaries were jailed for four years for complicity in the operation, which led to arrests the day of a foiled flight from the east Chad town of Abeche on Oct. 25.
Authorization for their departure under a 1976 bilateral accord came earlier yesterday from Chadian Justice Minister Albert Pahimi Padacke, who said: "I have responded favorably to the transfer request from France this morning. Nothing now stands in the way."
The convicts were accompanied on the French-chartered jet by eight French prison officials who arrived on Thursday on a regular Air France flight, with six Chadian gendarmes and two doctors.
An informed source in Ndjamena said the plane was headed for Villacoublay military airbase near Paris, while lawyers said the next step for the six would be appearance before a court that would adjust their sentences. Forced labour is not a French practice, but commuting it to jail terms will require Chadian judicial approval.
The charity workers protested innocence throughout the trial, saying they were misled by intermediaries, but international aid staff found almost all the children were Chadian and not war refugees from across the eastern border, and that all had at least one living parent.
All eight convicts were ordered jointly to pay 4.12 billion CFA francs (US$9.2 million) to the families of the children caught up in the affair.
Zoe's Ark head Eric Breteau insisted intermediaries had lied about the children, but families in the trial said they had been deceived and told their offspring were going to be educated in eastern Chad.
The case raised tensions between France and Chad, a former French colony, as Paris prepares to spearhead a 3,500-strong EU peacekeeping force in eastern Chad to protect refugee camps in the region bordering Darfur.
Lawyers complained of political interference, a charge first provoked when French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Nov. 4 flew to Chad to bring home three French journalists and four Spanish air hostesses initially charged in the affair.
Two days later, Sarkozy riled Chadian political and judicial authorities by saying he would collect the others, "whatever they have done."
The affair also prompted concerns over the sometimes murky world of adoptions by Western couples of children from developing countries.
The UN children's agency UNICEF has said it was working with the Chadian government to ensure stricter controls on charities in order to restore trust in international aid workers.
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