Six Charity Workers Face Trial in Chad

Six French members of the Zoe’s Ark charity are among 10 people who will be tried by a criminal court in Chad after they attempted to fly 103 African children to France, reports Agence France-Presse.

The others include three Chadians, and a Sudanese national who are being held for complicity in kidnappings and fraud.

A Chadian judge has dismissed the case against 12 other suspects. The French workers were among a group of 17 Europeans arrested in the Chadian city of Abeche after the group tried to fly the African children to France last month, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Those being tried face charges of kidnapping minors, fraud, and document forgery.

The defendants face terms of between five and 20 years of hard labor if they are found guilty. All six French defendants say they are innocent, and lawyers for Zoe’s Ark have argued that the children were orphans from Darfur, the war-torn Sudanese region that borders Chad.

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