ABECHE (Chad), Nov 1: International aid agencies on Thursday rejected the war orphan label attached to 103 children at the centre of a child abduction scandal involving a French charity in Chad.

In a joint statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Unicef said 91 of the children had spoken of coming from a “family environment with at least one adult in a parental role”.

“Therefore they cannot be considered to be orphans,” ICRC spokeswoman Anna Schaaf told AFP in Geneva.

Schaaf said questioning of the children suggested that most of them were in fact Chadians.

Chad’s security forces have arrested 19 people since a small French charity, Zoe’s Ark, attempted to fly the children to France, believing they were orphans from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur across the desert border.

Nine French nationals -- six members of the charity and three journalists -- face a forced labour sentence on charges of kidnapping and extortion, while seven-member Spanish flight crew are charged with complicity.

A Belgian pilot of 75 was also charged on Wednesday because he had flown the children from the border settlement of Adre to the main eastern town of Abeche, where the Zoe’s Ark people were arrested on October 25.

The charity workers have rejected any suggestion of a kidnap operation, saying they had acted in good faith, believing they were saving Darfurese children from certain death.

The relief agencies’ statement said most of the children appeared to have come from villages along the Chad-Sudan border, which is a porous area that has for years been wracked not only by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees but Chadian rebel insurgency and ethnic strife.

“Most of the children are Chadian, but not all,” said Schaaf.

The statement said relief workers had spent days talking to the 21 girls and 82 boys aged between one and about 10.

“From the information gathered, they live in villages on Chad’s territory, but we don’t know if they originate from these villages. We could not tell what their nationality is,” Schaaf said.

For the Chad government, the origin of the children is a moot point. “Whatever the case, whether the children are Chadian or Sudanese, the (Zoe’s Ark) operation took place in Chad. That’s what matters,” a senior Chadian official who asked not to be named told AFP on Thursday.

The Belgian pilot has been jailed in N’Djamena, while the other arrested Europeans are still in police custody in Abeche.—AFP