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A French journalist arrested with members of the Zoe's Ark group in Chad as they tried to fly 103 African children to Europe said yesterday that they had displayed "dramatic amateurishness" and lied about their plans.
Marc Garmirian, one of three French reporters released on Monday, interviewed members of the group during the operation and filmed them putting bandages on children to make them seem injured before their planned flight to France.
"I realised rather quickly that in what you could call the investigation, or the interviews they conducted with the children or the people who brought them the children, they displayed a dramatic amateurishness," he told TF1 television.
Six of the 10 Europeans still in custody are members of the organisation Zoe's Ark, which has said it intended to place orphans from Darfur with European families for foster care and that it had the right to do so under international law.
But United Nations and Chadian officials say most of the 103 children, who are between 1 and 10 years old, have at least one living parent and came from the violent Chad-Sudan border area.
Garmirian's employer, French news agency CAPA, released television footage that showed members of Zoe's Ark putting bandages on children and pouring dark liquid on them to make it seem as though they were injured. The head of Zoe's Ark, Eric Breteau, said in the footage that he knew he might be arrested over the operation.
"If I am thrown in prison for saving children from Darfur ... I think that after all I would be proud to go to prison for that," Breteau said.
Garmirian, who left Chad on President Nicolas Sarkozy's plane with the two other reporters and four Spanish flight attendants, said Zoe's Ark workers failed to tell Chadians they dealt with that they planned to take the children to France.
"They lied to all the Chadians," he told Reuters Television.
"According to them it was an essential condition of the operation's success.
"They worked for a month and a half with around 100 people - accountants, nannies who looked after the children, cooks, drivers - to all these people their message was, 'We are opening an orphanage in Abeche'," Garmirian said.
"But at no point did they tell them that they were going to send them to France."
Two members of Zoe's Ark - Breteau and Emilie Lelouch - remained convinced that they had acted legally, he said.
"You could say that they are lunatics, fanatics."
The Spanish air steward gave a thumbs-up signal to Spanish journalists calling him through the window, but one of the policemen in the room warned him not to talk to them.
Two female members of Zoe's Ark lay resting on benches while two male colleagues paced the room, smoking, drinking water and appearing to joke occasionally.
* ZOE'S ARK, (L'ARCHE DE ZOE)
The group was created by a group of French motoring enthusiasts after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. They set up four temporary camps in Banda Aceh in Indonesia.
The organisation has a president, Eric Breteau, and a general secretary and around 50 active volunteers.
In April, Zoe's Ark announced a campaign to evacuate 10,000 orphans from Sudan's Darfur region alongside other French charities including Sauver le Darfour.
It said it wanted to place orphaned Darfuri children aged under 5 in foster care with French families, saying it had a right to do so under international law.
General secretary Stephanie Lefebvre told the Le Parisien daily last month the organisation never aimed to have the children in its care adopted, and simply wanted to save them from starvation.
A seven-strong team was based in Chad. Lefebvre said the group sought authorisation from French authorities to grant safe passage to the children it intended to bring to France.
France's Foreign Ministry had 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.
- Reuters
