The children who French charity workers claimed were orphans from Darfur said they had been bribed to leave their homes with sweets and biscuits. They were facing death in the Darfur region of Sudan, according to the charity, Zoe’s Ark, which had lined up foster families in France to look after them.

Local officials who interviewed the children, aged between 3 and 10, in the compound in Abeche, near the Darfur border, where they spent the weekend, say most are from Chad – a claim backed by Unicef. The UN children’s organisation said bandages put on the children by members of Zoe’s Ark were designed to portray them as war victims. None were wounded and, said Unicef: “There is no reason to believe they are orphans.”

Mariam, 10, said her mother was dead but her father was alive. “A car came with two whites and one black man, who spoke Arabic. The driver said, ‘Come with me, I’ll give you some money and biscuits and then I’ll take you home’,” she told reporters.

“We were taken to the white people’s house and they gave us medicine – small white tablets. I was not ill. All the children were given pills. They told us that we would no longer be able to go home.”

Hamsa Brahim, 10, from Adikoum, a village on the border between Chad and Sudan, said that he left home with his father’s permission after “the whites came. They said they would enrol us in school. They came four times to take children from our village – many children went with them”.

Idriss Deby, the Chadian President, said that the charity had sought to “trick” local authorities and called for “severe punishment”. Denouncing the operation as “kidnap, pure and simple”, he asked whether Zoe’s Ark intended to sell the children “or kill them and remove their organs”.

The children’s stories fuelled the controversy over what was initially described as a humanitarian mission to fly thousands of children out of Africa to foster care in Europe. They came amid embarrassment in Paris over a revelation that the French Army had helped the operation, denounced as illegal by France, Chad and Unicef.

Six members of Zoe’s Ark, a charity based near Paris, were detained in Chad last week as they prepared to fly 103 children from Abeche to Rheims in eastern France. Three French journalists with them and the pilot and seven Spanish crew members of their aircraft were also held. All 17 are expected to be told today whether they will face charges of child smuggling.

There was debate in France over the aim of Zoe Ark’s mission, which has been highly publicised since the summer. The charity said that it intended to remove 1,000 children from Darfur and place them in foster care in France. A further 9,000 children would be taken elsewhere in Europe at a later stage, it said. But critics said many of the host families were child-less couples, led to believe that they could begin an adoption procedure. Most paid between €2,800 and €6,000 (£2,000-£4,300) to the charity, which is reported to have registered donations totalling at least €1 million.

As a crisis unit was set up by the French Foreign Ministry, officials in Paris said that they had tried to dissuade Zoe’s Ark from its mission. Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, telephoned Mr Deby in an to attempt defuse the situation and sent Bruno Foucher, the French Ambassador, from the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, to Abeche.

The French Army conceded that it had flown the charity’s workers on at least three occasions and let them buy supplies at its stores. It said that soldiers had been unaware of the nature of the operation, but the disclosure gave weight to claims by Zoe’s Ark that Paris had offered tacit approval.

“If there was an official ban . . . we would have received an official document,” said Maître Gilbert Collard, the lawyer for the charity, which claimed that the Chadian authorities had been aware of its members’ presence in the region for the past six weeks.

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