BB FANS

Police Station Torched By Rioting Youths Skynews

In the name of God: the Saudi rape victim's tale
A young woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang-raped. The Western world has expressed outrage – which has, in turn, provoked anger among the Saudi establishment. Now, for the first time, the woman tells her story. By Daniel Howden
Published: 29 November 2007

Inside Saudi Arabia she has come to be known simply as the "Qatif girl", a teenager who was gang-raped then humiliated by first the police, then the judicial authorities. Her case has propelled her into the international headlines and made her an acute embarrassment for the House of Saud. To the Saudi Justice Ministry, she is an adulteress whose case is being used by critics of the Kingdom. To much of the rest of the world, she is a symbol of all that's wrong with Saudi Arabia.

Today she lives under effective house arrest. She is forbidden to speak and may be taken into custody at any time. Her family's movements are monitored by the religious police and their telephones are tapped.

Her lawyer, Saudi Arabia's foremost human rights advocate, Abd al-Rahman al-Lahem, has been suspended. He has had his passport confiscated and faces a hearing next week in which he may be disbarred. The crime of "Qatif girl", it seems, has been to refuse to be silent about what has happened to her. The 19-year-old first sought to bring to justice the seven men who raped her, then complained in public when the courts saw fit to sentence her to 90 lashes for "mingling", the crime of being out in public with a male who was not her relative prior to the attack.

Coverage of the case this month in the usually tightly censored Saudi media infuriated the authorities. They increased her sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Her sentence still hangs over her.

The girl's fate has become an issue in the US presidential election where the candidates have lined up to denounce her treatment as "barbaric", and Prince Saud al-Faisal was forced, much to his annoyance, to answer hostile questions about her case at the Middle East peace talks in Annapolis this week. "What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people," he told reporters.

The Saudi Justice Ministry has launched a deliberate "campaign of defamation" against the girl, said Farida Deif, a Middle East expert with Human Rights Watch, who is among the few independent observers to have met the girl. "They are saying she is not really a victim," Ms Deif said. "They are implying she was an adulteress. They are saying she was undressed before the attackers entered her car."

The Independent has obtained testimony in which the girl describes her attack, the struggle to get the police to take action and the harrowing court appearances that followed.

Her ordeal began with a telephone call: "I had a relationship with someone on the phone," she recounted to Human Rights Watch. "We were both 16. I had never seen him before. I just knew his voice. He started to threaten me, and I got afraid. He threatened to tell my family about the relationship. Because of the threats and fear, I agreed to give him a photo of myself."

A few months later, she said, after she had been married to another man, she became concerned that the photograph might be misused and asked the boy to return it. He accepted on the condition that she would meet him and go for a drive with him. She agreed, reluctantly, to meet the boy at a nearby market. They were driving towards her home when a second car stopped in front of them, she said. "I told the individual with me not to open the door, but he did. He let them come in. I screamed."

She and her companion were taken to a secluded spot where they were both raped, many times. "They forced me out of the car," the girl said. "They pushed me really hard. I yelled out, 'Where are you taking me? I'm like your sister.' They took me to a dark place. Then two men came in. The first man with the knife raped me. I was destroyed. If I tried to escape, I don't even know where I would go. I tried to force them off but I couldn't. In my heart, I didn't even feel anything after that. I spent two hours begging them to take me home."

The second man then raped her, then a third. "There was a lot of violence," she said. In the hours that followed her attackers told the girl they knew she was married. She was raped by a fourth man and then a fifth. "The fifth one took a photo of me like this. I tried to cover my face but they didn't let me."

Despite the prosecution's requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The images recorded on the mobile phone were presented in court, according to her lawyer, but the judges ignored them.

Her ordeal continued after the fifth rape. Two more men, one with his face covered entered the room and raped her. She repeatedly asked what time it was and was told 1am. Afterwards all seven men came back and the girl was raped again.

"Then they took me home. They drove me in their car. They took my mobile and said that if I wanted it back, I would have to call them. They saw my husband's photo in my wallet when they were searching through my things. When I got out of the car, I couldn't even walk. I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the door. She said, 'You look tired'. She thought I was with my husband. I didn't eat for one week after that. Just water. I didn't tell anyone. I can't sleep without pills. I used to see their faces in my sleep."

Under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of sharia law, women are not allowed in public in the company of men other than their male relatives. Also, women in Saudi Arabia are often sentenced to flogging and even death for adultery and other perceived crimes.

In addition to these intimidating barriers facing the victim in a country with possibly the worst women's rights record in the world, the girl was also a member of the persecuted Shia minority and her attackers were Sunni. This sectarian divide would be crucial to what happened next.

"The criminals started talking about it [the rape] in my neighbourhood. They thought my husband would divorce me. They wanted to ruin my reputation. I was trying to fix something by getting the photo back and something worse happened."

Irfan Al-Alawi, a Saudi academic and expert on religious persecution in the Kingdom, said that the sectarian background was crucial to understanding the crime.

"Qatif is a centre of the large Shia minority in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The so-called religious police or mutawiyin, who are brutal in any case, were also acting here in support of Sunni domination over the Shia in Qatif."

Against her attackers' expectations, the girl's husband did not divorce her when news of the attack reached him; instead he sought justice through the courts.

Her husband recalls the frustration of seeing his wife's attackers walking free. "Two of the criminals were walking around in our neighbourhood right in front of me. They attended funerals and weddings. They [the police] should have arrested them out of respect for us. I called the police and told them, 'Find me a solution. The criminals are out on the street. What if they try to kidnap her again?' The police officer said, 'You go find them and investigate'."

He did just that and telephoned the police on four occasions before action was eventually taken. But when the case did come to court the girl's ordeal continued.

She said: "They [the judges] said to me, 'What kind of relationship did you have with this individual? Why did you leave the house? Do you know these men?' They used to yell at me. They were insulting. The judge refused to allow my husband in the room with me. One judge told me I was a liar because I didn't remember the dates well. They kept saying, 'Why did you leave the house? Why didn't you tell your husband?'

"At the second session, they called me in from the waiting room. I went in with my husband. They sentenced some of them to five years, others to three. I thought these people shouldn't even live. I thought they would get a minimum of 20 years. I prayed that they wouldn't even live. Then he said, '[name withheld], you get 90 lashes. You should thank God that you're not in prison'. I asked why and he said, 'You know why. Because it's khilwa hair sharan [mingling begets evil]'. Everyone looks at me as if I'm wrong. I couldn't even continue my studies. I wanted to die."

The ordeal is still not over. The Qatif girl and her husband face an intensely uncertain future. She has been attacked by her brother, who reportedly tried to kill her. Her lawyer, Al-Lahem, believes she may now be pursued by Sunni extremists through the sharia courts.

Her appalling treatment was summed up in one exchange between her husband and the judges at the first sentencing. "It was like she was the criminal," he remembered. "When the judges passed down the sentence, I asked them, 'Don't you have any dignity?'"
Independent

Robert Fisk: A different venue, but the pious claims and promises are the same

Haven't we been here before? Isn't Annapolis just a repeat of the White House lawn and the Oslo agreement, a series of pious claims and promises in which two weak men, Messrs Abbas and Olmert, even use the same words of Oslo.

"It is time for the cycle of blood, violence and occupation to end," the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. But don't I remember Yitzhak Rabin saying on the White House lawn that, "it is time for the cycle of blood... to end"?

Jerusalem and its place as a Palestinian and Israeli capital isn't there. And if Israel receives acknowledgement that it is indeed an Israeli state – and in reality, of course, it is – there can be no "right of return" for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled (or whose families fled) what became Israel in 1948.

And what am I to make of the following quotation from the full text of the joint document: "The steering committee will develop a joint work plan and establish and oversee the work of negotiations (sic) teams to address all issues, to be headed by one lead representative from each party." Come again?

We went through all these steering committees before – and they never worked. True we've got a date of 12 December for the first session of this so-called "steering committee" and we have the faint hope from Mr Bush, embroidered, of course, with all the usual self-confidence, that we're going to have an agreement by 2008. But how can the Palestinians have a state without a capital in Jerusalem? How can they have a state when their entire territory has been chopped up and divided by Jewish settlements and the settler roads and, in parts, by a massive war?

Yes of course, we all want an end to bloodshed in the Middle East but the Americans are going to need Syria and Iran to support this – or at least Syrian support to control Hamas – and what do we get? Bush continues to threaten Iran and Bush tells Syria in Annapolis that it must keep clear of Lebanese elections, or else...

Yes, Hizbollah is a surrogate of Iran and is playing a leading role in the opposition to the government of Lebanon. Do Bush and Condoleezza Rice (or Abbas or Olmert for that matter) really think they're going to have a free ride for a year without the full involvement of every party in the region? More than half of the Palestinians under occupation are under the control of Hamas.

Reading the speeches – especially the joint document – it seems like an exercise in self-delusion. The Middle East is currently a hell disaster and the President of the United States thinks he is going to produce the crown jewels from a cabinet and forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran – and Pakistan, for that matter. The worst element of the whole Annapolis shindig is that once again millions of people across the Middle East – Muslims, Jews and Christians – will believe all this and will then turn – after its failure – with fury on their antagonists for breaking these agreements.

For more than two years, the Saudis have been offering Israel security and recognition by Arab states in return for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. What was wrong with that? Mr Olmert promised that "negotiations will address all the issues which thus far has been evaded". Yet the phrase "withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories" simply doesn't exist in the text.

Like most people who live in the Middle East, I would like to enjoy these dreams and believe they are true. But they are not. Wait for the end of 2008.
Independent

A gunman has taken people hostage at Hillary Clinton's campaign office in New Hampshire.
Skynews

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens timesonline

U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work nytimes

Fox News refuses to run pro-Constitution ad mediamatters

Italy in uproar over call for SS tactics against immigrants Mail

CIA destroyed video of 'waterboarding' al-Qaida detainees



The CIA destroyed video evidence of the coercive interrogation of al-Qaida operatives held under its secret rendition programme in order to shield agents from prosecution, it was revealed yesterday.

The decision to destroy two videotapes documenting the use of waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah and another high-value al-Qaida detainee was made in November 2005 - as American media were just beginning to focus on the existence of the secret CIA prison network.

"The tapes posed a serious security risk," the CIA's director, Michael Hayden, told agency employees in a statement yesterday. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the programme, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathisers."


Hayden's message to CIA employees went out a day after he learned that the New York Times planned to publish an article today about destruction of the videotapes.

The revelation is bound to reignite debate in Congress about the use of torture in the war on terror. But far more seriously for the Bush administration, it raises the prospect that the CIA withheld information from and obstructed the work of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks as well as lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 11th hijacker. Officials from the September 11 commission told the New York Times yesterday they had formally requested from the CIA evidence of interrogations, and had been informed that all materials had been handed over.

The Washington Post, which also carried a story on its website yesterday about the destroyed videotapes, reported that the order to destroy the tapes came from Jose Rodriguez Jr, then the director of the CIA's clandestine operations.

The leaders of the house and Senate intelligence committees - which were then under Republican control - were aware of the existence of the footage and the CIA's decision to destroy the material, Hayden said in his memo. However, Democratic committee members who had long demanded that such interrogations be videotaped, were not made aware of the existence of the tapes, the Times reported.

Hayden said the interrogations were filmed in 2002 after George Bush authorised the use of harsh interrogation, including the controversial practice of controlled drowning, known as waterboarding, against al-Qaida suspects.

"The agency was determined that it proceed in accord with established legal and policy guidelines," Hayden wrote. "So, on its own, CIA began to videotape interrogations."

However, the CIA soon discontinued the practice, and it is believed that only two detainees were filmed while undergoing interrogation. It has long been believed that Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi believed to be a close associated of Osama bin Laden, was subjected to harsh treatment following his capture in Pakistan in March 2002.

The footage would have clarified what practices such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation - both of which a gravely wounded Abu Zubaydah was subjected to - involve.
guardian

German mother held after five boys found dead




Postmortem examinations were carried out yesterday on five boys believed to have been killed by their mother giving them an overdose of sleeping tablets before suffocating them with plastic bags.

The children, aged three to nine, were discovered after their 31-year old mother led a doctor to their bodies. It is not yet known when they died, but social workers yesterday knocked on the door of the family house after the children failed to appear at school.

The woman, who is thought to have suffered a history of mental illness, has been taken into psychiatric care, according to the local prosecutor Uwe Wick.

"We have requested that the woman be held in a secure psychiatric facility because we assume that she represents a general danger to the public," Wick said.

Villagers in Darry, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, were struggling to come to terms with the news yesterday. The timetable at the local school was suspended as priests and psychologists were brought in to talk to the children.


In a separate case 400 miles away, the bodies of three baby girls were found in Plauen. Their 28-year-old mother was arrested on suspicion of murder. All the children were wrapped in plastic. One had been placed in a suitcase, another in a freezer and the third on a balcony.

The families minister, Ursula von der Leyen, called for inquiries into both cases. "These incidents didn't just happen out of the blue," she said. "We need to see whether there were warning signals or whether information went astray."

Last month a five-year-old girl was found starved to death in the eastern town of Schwerin.
guardian

Outrage as rape nine are freed


A woman judge who declared that a girl of 10 "probably agreed" to gang sex with nine males has outraged the whole of Australia.

New PM Kevin Rudd is among those disgusted by the decision not to jail the men, who took turns to rape the girl.

An inquiry has begun into why district court judge Sarah Bradley did not record convictions against six teenagers and gave suspended sentences to the three adults over the 2005 gang rape at an Aboriginal community in North Queensland.

All nine pleaded guilty to rape. But during sentencing, Judge Bradley, 51, said: "The girl was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of you."


Mr Rudd said he was "horrified" at the case.
Mirror

UN staff among 47 killed in Algeria blasts

d




Ten UN staff were among those killed by bomb blasts in the capital of Algeria today.

Two car bombs rammed into the office of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the country's constitutional court in upmarket areas of Algiers.

Forty-seven people were killed in total, with a further 43 wounded. Security officials have warned the death toll could top 60.

The two car bombs happened just 10 minutes apart.

All phone lines in the capital have been jammed.

The first car bomb was driven into the constitutional court building in the Ben Aknoun district of Algiers, killing at least 30 people. Algeria's official news agency reported that several victims were students on a school bus.

Ten minutes later, the second car bomb was driven into the UNHCR in the Hydra district, killing at least 15.

Jean Fabre of the UN Development Programme said it was still unknown who died or which UN agencies they represented.

Fabre said he had received the information from Marc Destanne de Bernis, the agency's top official in the Algerian capital.

Another spokesman for the UN Development Programme, whose offices were in one of the damaged buildings, said they had been unable to establish contact with any of their staff after the 9.30am (08.30 GMT) explosion.

After news reports of the blasts, people took to the streets of el-Biar and Ben Aknoun areas, where several western firms have offices.

Eyewitnesses in Ben Aknoun reported a body lying on the road, covered with a white blanket. Two buses burned, and debris from damaged cars was strewn across pavements.

Today's twin blasts are the latest in a series of bomb attacks in Algeria this year, and will confirm fears that al-Qaida has opened up a new front in north Africa, also known as the Maghreb.

In April, explosions at a police station and the prime minister's office killed 30 and wounded 100 in what was thought to be the worst violence Algeria had seen since the civil war ended in 2002.

Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the blasts.

Since then, the terror group has also claimed responsibility for attacks in July and two blasts, at a coastguard barracks and among a crowd of people waiting to meet the Algerian leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in September. The September bombs killed more than 50 people and injured more than 150.

Intelligence services are divided about the nature of terrorist activity in the region. One view is that it remains directly linked to the bloody civil war of the 1990s and is carried out for local reasons by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

However, earlier this year the GSPC pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, renaming itself the al-Qaida Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb.

On September 11 last year, al-Qaida's No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a videotaped message saying Bin Laden had personally approved the "blessed union".

Algeria collapsed into violence in 1992 after the authorities scrapped an election that an Islamist party looked set to win.

President Bouteflika has vowed to pursue his controversial policy of national reconciliation, aiming to grant amnesty to Islamist activists renouncing the violence that killed some 200,000 people in the 90s.

Some 2,000 activists have been released from prison.
guardian

IoS Appeal: Afghan Mother and Child Rescue:
By Raymond Whitaker in Darra, Afghanistan

a new clinic high in the mountains Roddy Jones and contractor Rehman discuss progress in constructing the Mother and Child Health Clinic at Darra

A mother pulls down her blue burqa as we approach the community health clinic at Darra, high in the mountains of Afghanistan. The baby in her arms is grizzling listlessly. "He has a respiratory ailment, but the basic problem is that he is malnourished, like most of the children here," explains Hadisa Aladod, the clinic's midwife, as the woman queues up at the dispensary counter for medicine.

Even by Afghan standards, Darra is remote. The village is up a side valley off the Panjshir, which runs between the peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The tar runs out a few miles short of the turning where the Darra and Panjshir rivers meet, and the clinic is at the end of an hour and a half of bone-jarring dirt track. When there is a medical emergency, its ambulance faces a difficult journey to reach the hospital at Anabar, near the mouth of the Panjshir Valley.

Up here land is scarce, and the clinic is perched on a steep slope. This at least spared it when a flash flood roared down the Darra river last summer, carrying a torrent of boulders, trees and silt that washed out bridges, killed 100 people and cut off the village for weeks. It is a tough climb for pregnant women or those with small babies, but Ms Aladod says that is not the main reason many of them stay away.

"The biggest problem is lack of space," the midwife says in her tiny consulting room, which feels crowded even with the two of us. It is just off a busy hallway, and cultural restraints against mingling with strangers make many women reluctant to come here, let alone give birth in these cramped surroundings. Dr Ayobi Sayed Habibullah, a provincial adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Public Health, also complains there is nowhere to give lessons in basic hygiene or family planning.

Instead Ms Aladod has to attend many births in women's homes, where any complications that might appear can prove fatal. Afghanistan has managed to bring down the number of children who die in their first year to 165 per 1,000, still the second worst in the world, but the midwife reckons it is higher here. "We are up in the mountains, and access is poor," she says.

The solution to many of these problems is taking shape next door to the clinic, where Afghan Mother and Child Rescue (AMCR), the charity The Independent on Sunday is supporting for its Christmas appeal, is building a facility dedicated exclusively to women and their children. It is modelled on its two existing mother-and-child health clinics in the Panjshir, which have already had a dramatic impact on mortality rates.

AMCR, founded by a retired Coldstream Guards officer, Brigadier Peter Stewart-Richardson, is a decidedly hands-on charity. As soon as we arrive in Darra, Roddy Jones, a 73-year-old former major in the Royal Welch Fusiliers who is an AMCR trustee, goes into trouble-shooting mode. The flood has delayed the start of the project, and forced the builders to site the clinic higher up the hill. Roddy tells the contractor to get the roof on with all speed, to prevent the winter's heavy snows from damaging the new walls, and works out where a flight of steps will have to be added. Another difficulty is water: the owner of a spring above the clinic is claiming the supply for himself. Roddy decrees that, rather than wait for a deal which may never come, water should be pumped up from the river.

Despite these obstacles, the mother-and-child clinic will be in operation next year. Experience has shown that when women know there is a clinic specially for them, they come in far greater numbers for pre-natal checks, choose to have their babies in clean and secure surroundings rather than at home, and bring their children back regularly to have their health monitored.

Each clinic costs about £30,000 to build, and the local health authorities have identified the need for at least three more in the Panjshir alone. Zahir Khan, provincial finance director of the Afghan Ministry of Public Health, said many aid agencies made commitments that were never fulfilled, but Afghan Mother and Child Rescue was different: as fast as readers donate to our appeal, the clinics will be constructed. "What Mr Roddy promises, he delivers," said Mr Khan.

The Independent on Sunday Christmas appeal

How you can give hope to the most vulnerable

Donations from Independent on Sunday readers have put Afghan Mother and Child Rescue well on target to build another clinic, helping to save the lives of women and their children in one of the world's poorest countries. But more is still needed.

Donate online http://www.independent.co.uk/iosappeal

Send cheques, made payable to "Afghan Mother and Child Rescue", to Afghan Mother and Child Rescue, 128 Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH

A Gift Aid declaration form, which increases every pound you donate by 28p, can be downloaded at: http://www.amcr.org.uk/ GIFT_AID_DONATION_FORM.pdf

By BACS transfer

Account name: Afghan Mother and Child Rescue

Account number: 00011780

Sort code: 40-52-40

For more information on Afghan Mother and Child Rescue (registered charity no 1097423), visit http://www.amcr.org.uk

Aborigine rape official suspended



New Australian PM Kevin Rudd said he was appalled by the judgement
The prosecutor in a child rape case which has sparked outrage in Australia has been stood aside pending an investigation into his actions.

Steve Carter did not seek prison sentences for nine indigenous males who admitted the gang rape of a 10-year-old Aboriginal girl in Northern Queensland.

The female judge in the case let the men walk free after saying the girl had probably given her consent.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has said he is appalled by the case.

When news emerged that the self-confessed rapists had been allowed to walk free, Judge Sarah Bradley was vilified for her comment that the girl had probably agreed to have sex with them all.

'Childish experimentation'

Now it is the actions of the prosecutor in the case which are coming under close scrutiny.

A group of Aboriginal people (file image)
Sexual abuse has been a noted problem among Aborigines

Court transcripts show that Steve Carter, the senior legal officer for that part of Northern Queensland, described the 2006 gang rape as childish experimentation and said it was consensual in a general sense.

He told Judge Bradley the offenders had not forced themselves on the girl and nor did they threaten her.

On that basis, he recommended no conviction should be recorded against six of the offenders who were juveniles.

The director of public prosecutions has now announced a review of Mr Carter's conduct and he has been stood aside in the meantime.

One senior child safety officer in Queensland has already been sacked over the incident and two others suspended.

That followed the revelation that the victim had been sent back to her home community after a period in foster care despite being gang-raped there at the age of seven.

Both the courts and the child safety department have offered her little protection.
BBC

Eight years' hard labour for charity group in bogus orphans scam


· Six jailed over claims that children were from Darfur
· Scam embarrasses France and hinders genuine aid


Six French charity workers were yesterday sentenced to eight years' hard labour for trying to fly more than 100 children out of Chad to France by claiming they were Darfur war orphans.

The members of Zoe's Ark, a charity set up by a former firefighter, were found guilty of attempted child kidnap and fraud by a court in Chad capital, N'Djamena.

In October, the group, one of them a doctor and another a nurse, illegally attempted to fly out 103 children aged from one to 10 to live with European families who had each paid thousands of euros.


The operation had not been approved by any government. Its discovery created a scandal which threatened diplomatic relations between France and Chad, its former colony and complicated the work of bona fide aid workers in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

French officials called yesterday's court verdicts a "sovereign decision", but said Paris would try to implement a 1976 bilateral judicial accord with Chad to allow the six to serve their sentences in their home country. The foreign ministry said it would "ask the Chadian authorities for the transfer of the convicted to France", while a source close to the case told Agence France Presse the six could be home within days.

The verdicts followed a four-day trial. On hearing them, one member of the group broke down and fell into the arms of her lawyer. She had already been treated by doctors during the trial, after going on a hunger strike.

The court also sentenced a Chadian and a Sudanese who worked with the charity as intermediaries to four years in prison for complicity in the attempted kidnap. The jury acquitted two other Chadian defendants.

Zoe's Ark insisted during the trial that its workers had acted out of humanitarian concern and wanted to give the children of Darfur a better life. Celine Lorenzon, a lawyer for the six, called the sentence "a judicial masquerade." The wife of Zoe's Ark logistics chief Alain Peligat expressed a "feeling of injustice ... because this case involves doctors, rescue workers, professors - not mercenaries - and they were simply going to save lives."

A spokeswoman for a number of the would-be foster families who support Zoe's Ark said they felt "crushed".

UN agencies established that most of the 103 children Zoe's Ark was planning to fly out were not Darfur orphans, but came from villages in Chad where they lived with at least one parent or close adult relative. While transported by the group, some of the fit and healthy children had been dressed with fake bandages to look ill. Families from villages on Chad's border with Sudan said they entrusted their children to the charity workers because they had no local schools and were told their children would be educated at a project in a nearby Chad town.

When the workers and the children were stopped by police near a freight airport in eastern Chad, more than 300 members of would-be "foster families" were waiting at an airport in France to collect the children. All of the eight convicted were ordered to pay a combined 4.12bn CFA francs (€6.3m, or £4.6m) to the families of the 103 children in the affair.

The group's charismatic leader, Eric Breteau, recruited the French "foster families" online and had delivered rousing speeches to them in regional meetings. On the last day of the trial he continued to insist he had done no wrong nor broken any law. The six claimed that they had been unaware of the childrens' true origin and situation because they had been misled by local intermediaries. Breteau apologised to any aggrieved Chad parents, but insisted he had acted in good faith and lamented that his operation had been prevented.

"If they [the children] are Sudanese ... we have deprived them of a better future; if they are Chadians and we were lied to, if we separated them from their families, we are really terribly sorry."

Chad's prosecutor general Beassoum Ben Ngassoro's said this was untrue: "They came with apparently humanitarian intentions, but rapidly switched to the non-humanitarian." Prosecution lawyers described Breteau as arrogant and showing no remorse - he was clearly capable to doing the same thing in future. He was also found guilty of using forged papers.

The case caused anti-French protests in Ndjamena, and came at a sensitive time in Chad's relations with Europe. France is preparing to lead a European Union peace-keeping force to help refugees along the borders of Chad and the Central African Republic with Sudan's Darfur region.

Aid workers say their already difficult job along Darfur's border has been complicated by the suspicion some Chadians now have toward all foreigners professing to offer help. Days after the Zoe's Ark workers were arrested, the Republic of Congo announced it was suspending all international adoptions.

Timeline

October 25 Chad police arrest three journalists and six Zoe's Ark charity workers near Sudan border on suspicion of trying to illegally airlift 103 children to Europe. Spanish aircrew and Belgian pilot also held

October 30 Kidnapping and fraud charges brought against the group, who claim they were rescuing refugee orphans from war-torn Darfur

October 31 Chadians take to streets to protest against child trafficking. President Idriss Deby promises severe punishment for the offenders

November 4 Nicholas Sarkozy flies to capital, N'Djamena, to meet Deby. French journalists and four Spanish flight attendants released, and remaining Spanish freed days later

December 7 Six French nationals go on hunger strike

December 21 Trial opens amid heavy security in N'Djamena courtroom

December 26 Six found guilty and sentenced to eight years' hard labour
[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2232273,00.html]guardian