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Zoe's Ark six arrive back in France to serve out sentences
2007-12-29
Six French charity workers convicted of trying to kidnap 103 children in Chad arrived Friday back in France where prosecutors were mulling how to adjust their hard labour sentences. On arrival at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on Friday night, French justice officials reminded the six of the sentences handed down to them by a Chadian court two days earlier, a legal source told AFP. The members of L'Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark) were convicted Wednesday of attempted abduction for having tried to fly the children to France, claiming they were war orphans from the Sudanese region of Darfur which borders eastern Chad. They were each sentenced to eight years' hard labour, while a Chadian and a Sudanese who worked as intermediaries were jailed for four years for complicity in the operation. The six were expected to appear before a French prosecutor before a court was due to adjust their sentences. Forced labour is not a French practice, but commuting it to jail terms will require Chadian judicial approval. The charity workers may also face charges related to a separate judicial inquiry opened in Paris in October, targeting the charity for possible swindling and for "illegal exercise of an intermediary activity with adoption in mind." The wife of one of the condemned men said they were to be incarcerated at Fresnes Prison, outside Paris, where there is also a penitentiary hospital should any of the six -- who launched a hunger strike on Thursday to protest their verdicts -- require medical attention. Christine Peligat, who is married to Zoe's Ark logistics coordinator Alain Peligat, said she had been informed of this by the justice ministry. The ministry offered no comment on the matter. According to Peligat, the six charity workers will spend between 10 and 15 days at the Fresnes institution before being transfer to prisons nearer their homes. "It's imperative that they go to hospital, their physical state is quite worrying," she said. Authorisation for the departure of the French nationals from Chad came earlier Friday from Chadian Justice Minister Albert Pahimi Padacke, who said: "I have responded favourably to the transfer request from France this morning. Nothing now stands in the way." The charity workers protested innocence throughout the trial, saying they had been misled about the children by middlemen. They were detained on October 25 when their flight, from the east Chad town of Abeche, was foiled. International aid staff later found almost all the children on board were Chadian and not war refugees from across the eastern border and that all had at least one living parent. The Chadian court also ordered the six French to jointly pay 4.12 billion CFA francs (6.3 million euros, 9.2 million dollars) to the families of the children caught up in the affair. Families at the trial said they had been deceived and told that their offspring were going to be educated in eastern Chad. The case raised tensions between France and Chad, a former French colony, as Paris prepares to spearhead a 3,500-strong EU peacekeeping force in eastern Chad to protect refugee camps in the region bordering Darfur. Lawyers complained of political interference, a charge first raised when French President Nicolas Sarkozy on November 4 flew to Chad to bring home three French journalists and four Spanish air hostesses initially charged in the affair. Two days later, Sarkozy riled Chadian political and judicial authorities by saying he would collect the others, "whatever they have done." The affair also prompted concerns over the sometimes murky world of adoptions by Western couples of children from developing countries. The UN children's agency UNICEF has said it is working with the Chadian government to ensure stricter controls on charities in order to restore trust in international aid workers.
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