Chad to charge French with abduction: prosecutor

ABECHE, Chad (Reuters) - Chadian authorities will charge nine French nationals with abducting children and fraud, a prosecutor said on Monday, after they tried to fly 103 African children out of the country to live with European families.

Seven Spanish charter plane crew members and two Chadians would be charged with being accessories to the crime, said Ahmat Daoud, public prosecutor in the eastern city of Abeche, where the group were detained on Thursday.

The accused include the president and other members of French organization Zoe's Ark, which said it intended to help the children, not abduct them, and that it acted legally.

The children were due to be housed in host families who paid the group several thousand euros each.

Zoe's Ark said the operation offered a better life to orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, many of whose people have fled over the border to camps in Chad.

"We are dealing with humanitarian hardliners who walked off the beaten track," Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for Zoe's Ark, told reporters in the southern French city of Marseille.

"They wanted to do things differently -- that doesn't mean they wanted to do it dishonestly," he told a news conference.

He accused Chad's government of using the situation for political ends, and said the children were from a region on the border between Chad and Sudan, adding: "We are unable to tell which country they are from."

Some of the children have said their parents were still alive, and they were lured from their villages on the Chad-Sudan border with offers of sweets and biscuits.

Daoud told Reuters that a judge in the city had yet to sign the papers. But he said that, "We have completed the file."

There were no charges yet against a 17th detained European, a Belgian airline pilot, who was being held separately.

"ABDUCTION"

Chadian President Idriss Deby called the operation "pure and simple abduction" and demanded tough penalties for those responsible. He suggested the children could have ended up being sold to a pedophile ring or used to supply human organs.

"These people ... treat us like animals. So this is the image of the savior Europe, which gives lessons to our countries. This is the image of Europe which helps Africans," Chad's official presidency Website quoted Deby as saying.

The incident threatens to complicate relations between France and its former colony as a predominantly French European Union force prepares for deployment in eastern Chad, one of Africa's most violent regions, to protect civilians there.

The French government has condemned the operation and its ambassador has said those involved would face Chadian justice.

France's Foreign Ministry issued a warning about Zoe's Ark in August, saying there was no guarantee the children were helpless orphans and casting doubt on the project's legality.

Zoe's Ark had previously said it aimed to have children adopted but it has stopped referring to adoption, which is not authorized in Chad or Sudan.

"Contrary to what was claimed, these children are not orphans and are not in a situation of distress," Chadian Justice Minister Albert Padacke said in an interview with French newspaper L'Est Republicain.

"Some children told me that people took advantage of their parents' absence to abduct them by force," he added.

A reporter for French news agency CAPA was among the French people arrested, and CAPA released footage of interviews with members of Zoe's Ark in which one person said they could never be completely sure the children were orphans in need of help.

"We tried to verify as much as possible. We can never be sure, of course. We cannot be sure about this information," said one unidentified man who was among those arrested.

(Additional reporting by Jean-Francois Rosnoblet in Marseille and Pascal Fletcher in Dakar)