Reporter backs Chad 'child snatch' charity

French charity workers charged with kidnapping 103 African children were stupid but sincere, a journalist held with them said today.

Nine French citizens were among 17 Europeans arrested in Chad last month when a charity calling itself Zoe’s Ark was stopped from flying the children to Europe.

Three French journalists and four Spanish flight attendants were released yesterday and flew home with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had met with Chad’s president.

Television reporter Marc Garmirian, who had accompanied the aid workers from France to report on their effort, raised doubts about the group’s methods, saying their “amateurism had dramatic consequences for the children.”

But he said the children were never in such danger that he felt he should put down his camera to intervene.

“They remained convinced of the legitimacy of the mission that they gave themselves, that is to free orphans from the war in Darfur,” he said.

He insisted the group were not child traffickers.

Zoe’s Ark 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.

France’s Foreign Ministry and others have cast doubt on the claims. Aid workers who interviewed the children last week said most had a least one parent and came from villages in the Chadian-Sudanese border region.

Mr Garmirian said determining the children’s nationality would be difficult because many were too young to remember if they had ever been attacked or whether they were Sudanese or Chadian.

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

Marie-Agnes Peleran, a journalist for France-3 television who accompanied the mission and was also freed yesterday, said she thought the operation happened too quickly for them to be certain whether or not the children were actually orphans.

The group’s biggest mistake, she said, was believing that “the end justified the means without thinking that the means change the end.”

Six charity workers have been charged with kidnapping. The plane’s Belgian pilot and three Spanish crew members are being held on accessory charges.