Sarkozy brings home seven held in Chad kidnap case

Seven Europeans who were among 17 detained in Chad and accused of attempting to kidnap 103 African children were freed and left the country with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

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

In July, Sarkozy's then-wife Cecilia helped broker the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor held for more than eight years in Libya, accused of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with the Aids virus in a hospital where they worked.

The Europeans - among them nine French citizens - were arrested on 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 on 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.

Sarkozy met Chad's leader, Idriss Deby, trading back-slaps and cheek kisses, before leaving Chad on his official jet with the three French journalists and four flight attendants from Spain.

"They are free. It's over. It's the end," said Jean-Bernard Padare, a lawyer for the group.

The French president's plane landed last night at a Spanish air force base outside Madrid, where Sarkozy and the flight crew members were greeted by Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and relatives of the flight attendants.

The group then continued to France, landing at a military air base outside Paris. Friends and family greeted the three journalists on the tarmac with excited hugs. The journalists spoke only briefly, saying they would hold a news conference today.

One of the three, Marie-Agnes Peleran, briefly defended the character of the charity's workers still detained in Chad.

"They're idealists but not criminals," she told LCI television.

Earlier, Deby said in Chad that he acted in his own volition when he freed the seven.

"There is no pressure on Chad, nor on President Deby," he said.

Later, French television channel M-6 aired a documentary raising further suspicions about how the charity group operated, made mostly with footage shot by one of the freed journalists who flew home with Sarkozy.

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 centre 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.

In other scenes, the charity workers wrap the children's heads and limbs in gauzy bandages, dousing some of them with iodine to make them look, in the words of one worker, like "war casualties".

The footage comes to an abrupt end when Chadian authorities detain the charity workers.

Zoe's Ark says its intentions were purely humanitarian and that it had conducted investigations over several weeks to determine the children it was taking were orphans.

During more than four years of fighting in Darfur, thousands have fled across the border into Chad to escape the fighting.

Aid workers have said most of the 103 children had been living for years in Chad and they had not yet determined whether they were indeed from Darfur.