Six French charity workers were sentenced to eight years’ hard labour in Chad yesterday for trying to kidnap 103 children to take them to France for adoption. Despite the verdicts, they are expected to be flown home soon.

The guilty verdicts are likely to conclude the African episode of the so-called Zoe’s Ark affair, in which French activists gathered children in eastern Chad whom they believed to be orphans from the Darfur conflict and arranged for them to fly to an airport in the Champagne region.

Foster families were waiting for them in October. It turned out that the children were from Chadian families and that most were not orphans. Their families had entrusted them to the French charity in the belief that they were to be educated locally.

The activities of Eric Breteau, a volunteer fireman, and his five colleagues from Zoe’s Ark sparked an outcry in Chad and embarrassed President Sarkozy, who nevertheless intervened in October with Idriss Déby, the President of the former French colony, to ensure that they would be returned to France. The group are expected to be sent to Paris to serve their sentences – at least in theory – in France under a 1976 judicial accord between Chad and France. They face a separate criminal investigation in France but it is unclear whether they will have to serve their full term.

Pascale Andreani, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, confirmed yesterday that a request would be made for the repatriation of the six.

At the end of a three-day trial Beassoum Ben Ngassorom, the state prosecutor, called on the N’djamena criminal court to sentence the French defendants to 7 to 11 years for attempted kidnapping and fraud and for not paying their bills. “They came with apparently humanitarian intentions but rapidly switched to the nonhumanitarian,” the prosecutor told the court. A Chadian citizen and a Sudanese man were sentenced to lighter terms of four years because “they were victims of deceit” by the French, as the prosecutor put it. Two Chadian officials were acquitted.

Mr Breteau, the founder of Zoe’s Ark, insisted throughout the trial that his group’s intentions had been honourable and his French lawyers said that they had merely been applying the concept of “humanitarian interference”, the doctrine devised in the 1980s by Bernard Kouchner, who is now the French Foreign Minister.

The wife of Alain Péligat, the Zoe’s Ark logistics chief, expressed a “feeling of injustice, of course, because this case involves doctors, rescue workers, professors – not mercenaries – and they were simply going to save lives”.

Mr Breteau offered an apology for the first time as the trial ended yesterday, saying that he had not intended to separate any Chadian parents from their children. He insisted that he and his colleagues had acted in good faith when they tried to fly the children from eastern Chad, near the border with the conflict-ridden Darfur region of Sudan, to France. “If they 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, for we never wanted to separate families,” he said.

The timing of the group’s return remains uncertain, especially since Mr Breteau angered the Chadian Government by announcing at the start of the trial that he expected to found guilty and then be home by the new year.

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