October 31, 2007	Wednesday	Shawwal 18, 1428

ABECHE (Chad), Oct 30: Sixteen Europeans charged over the alleged abduction of 103 children sat in a dusty cell in eastern Chad on Tuesday, as a row escalated in France over the failure to prevent the operation.

Nine French nationals, including six members of the charity Zoe’s Ark and three journalists, were charged late Monday with ‘kidnapping minors’ and ‘fraud’ for attempting to fly the children from the Chad-Darfur border to France, prosecutors in the eastern town of Abeche said.

Seven Spanish aircraft crew and two Chadian nationals were charged with complicity. Spain’s foreign ministry said it ‘disagrees’ with the charges and would seek the release of its nationals.

A angry mob of several dozen people gathered outside the court house in Abeche, calling the Europeans ‘thieves, killers’, and accusing former colonial power France of being an ‘accomplice’.

The Europeans were detained on Thursday as they prepared to put the children on a chartered flight to France. The children were presented as orphans whose lives were at risk from civil war in Sudan’s Darfur province.

Chadian President Idriss Deby has suggested the group planned to sell the children or ‘kill them and remove their organs’, drawing accusations that he is seeking to whip up public anger for political gain. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has condemned the operation. But his government is under pressure to explain why it allowed the operation to get so far.

Le Figaro newspaper reported that a French government official and gendarmes were due to ‘welcome’ the flight carrying the children at an airport east of Paris.

“We have got ourselves into an impossible situation and I would like to know exactly what the French authorities’ role was,” said the former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius.

“It is obvious the French authorities know what goes on in Chad,” he said.

“In this sorry affair, France has appeared confused, short of decent explanations, incapable of taking proper preventive action. In sum, guilty, at least, of negligence,” wrote the influential Le Monde newspaper.

Liberation newspaper said it “cannot doubt the goodwill of the head of Zoe’s Ark” and suggested the government was “heaping blame on its compatriots in jail” to “deny its own responsibilities.” France has 1,000 troops and fighter jets stationed in Chad, which is to start hosting a French-led European peacekeeping mission to protest refugee camps on the Darfur border from next month.

Paris says the deployment will not be affected, but experts warn the crisis comes at a critical time.

Eastern Chad is home to some 236,000 refugees from Darfur as well as some 173,000 displaced by a local rebellion.—AFP