N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Six French aid workers detained in Chad on suspicion of trying to smuggle 103 children to Europe will face a criminal prosecution, including attempted kidnapping and fraud, their lawyer said on Monday.
By Stephanie Hancock
N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Six French aid workers detained in Chad on suspicion of trying to smuggle 103 children to Europe will face a criminal prosecution, including attempted kidnapping and fraud, their lawyer said on Monday.
Abou Lamia, representing the members of the French humanitarian activist group Zoe's Ark, said four Chadians would also stand trial for attempted kidnapping.
Charges were dropped against 11 suspects who had been released, a legal source said. These were the seven Spanish crew of a plane chartered to fly the children to Europe, three French journalists and a Belgian pilot.
!ADVERTISEMENT!The six French nationals detained in Chad on October 25 started hunger strike on Friday night, refusing food but drinking water. They said no one was listening to their case and that they had been abandoned by the French government.
"They are a bit strained. They had been preparing for the worst and now it appears this was justified," Lamia said.
There has been a debate among legal experts in Chad in recent weeks as to whether the French aid workers should face criminal or civil charges after being arrested trying to fly the children, aged 1-10, out of the central African country. The six could face forced labor terms if convicted.
COMMON WILL
"We're bit surprised at how things have happened, because the facts of the case did not necessarily mean ... it would be a criminal trial," Lamia said, suggesting there had been political meddling in the case.
"We've seen that politics has tried to eclipse the judicial process and we regret that."
Lamia said the other two charges against his clients were lying on official documents and non-payment of rent. There was still no date set for the start of the trial, he said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chadian leader Idriss Deby discussed the case on the sidelines of an EU-Africa summit in Portugal on Saturday and had a "common will to resolve the situation," a French presidency spokesman said.
Deby has publicly vowed to punish those responsible for what he termed a "horrible act" and a "crime."
Zoe's Ark had said it wanted to fly orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region to Europe for fostering by families but U.N. officials who questioned the children said that the vast majority were not orphans and came from villages in the frontier region of eastern Chad.
France has strongly condemned the Zoe's Ark operation but the case has strained relations with its former colony ahead of the planned deployment of a European Union peacekeeping force in the restive east, expected in the coming weeks.
(Writing by Daniel Flynn, editing by Ralph Boulton)
