French charity workers to learn fate next week
December 7, 2007 (NDJAMENA) — Six French charity workers, five Chadian officials and a Sudanese refugee will learn next week if they are to face criminal proceedings over a bid to fly 103 children out of Chad, a judicial source said Friday.
“The prosecutor has sent the case to the examining magistrate with his petition,” the source in the state prosecutor’s office said, adding that the judge would decide next week if it was to be treated in a criminal court.
The judge has two other options — either to clear all or some of the suspects, or downgrade the charges from crimes to misdemeanours, as the lawyers for the six French suspects have been demanding.
Six French nationals are still incarcerated in Ndjamena on charges of kidnapping and fraud. Five Chadian officials and a Sudanese refugee are also detained for complicity.
One of the detained French nationals, Philippe Van Winkelberg, said the trial was flawed as all the suspects had been presumed guilty.
In a seven-page letter sent to his supporters back home, he denounced France for “encouraging the Chadian judiciary to condemn me while nobody is interested in the truth.
“All that the Chadian judiciary is interested in is not to seek the truth,” he wrote, adding that it was under pressure “to condemn, to punish and to seek vengeance for the consequences of colonialism in Africa.”
In October, Chadian authorities halted a controversial operation in the eastern city of Abeche, as charity members tried to board a France-bound plane with 103 children.
Zoe’s Ark has argued the children were orphans from Darfur, the bordering Sudanese region currently in the throes of a civil war.
But international humanitarian organisations claim almost all the children are from Chadian villages in the border area, and have at least one parent or adult guardian.
Also charged initially were three French journalists, seven Spanish air crew members chartered by Zoe’s Ark to take the children to France and a Belgian pilot who transported some of the children from Adre, near the Sudanese border, to Abeche.
They have since been released and repatriated, although the charges still hold in Chad.
Those charged could incur sentences of between five and 20 years of forced labour in Chad.
(AFP)