Most of the 103 African children which a French group had planned to fly out of Chad were not orphans as the group had claimed, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF said on Thursday.

A UNICEF spokeswoman in Chad said information derived from interviews with the children carried out by U.N. agencies and the Red Cross contradicted statements by the French group Zoe's Ark which had described them as sick and destitute orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

"They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities," Annette Rehrl of UNICEF in Chad told Reuters.

Nine French nationals, most of them members of the Zoe's Ark group, were arrested in the eastern Chadian town of Abeche last week after authorities stopped them from flying the children to Europe, saying they had no authorisation.

They have been charged with abduction and fraud and face possible forced labour terms of up to 20 years if convicted.

Seven Spanish crewmembers of the plane chartered by Zoe's Ark, a Belgian pilot and at least two Chadians have also been detained and charged as accessories.

Officials from the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been caring for the children, 21 girls and 82 boys aged between one and 10 years, at an Abeche orphanage. They had been asking them about their families and where they came from.

"During interviews with humanitarian staff, 91 children said they had been living with their families consisting of at least one adult they considered to be their parent," the English version of a joint U.N. and Red Cross report said.

A previous French version of the report had used the French word "parent" which has the broader meaning of relative, but Rehrl said it referred in this case to an adult the children considered their mother or father.

Children who lose their parents in Africa are often taken in by other family members.

Some of the children had already told journalists their parents were still alive and they were lured from their villages on the Chad-Sudan border with offers of sweets and biscuits.


HEALTH NOT A WORRY

Zoe's Ark said it planned to place Darfur orphans with European families, some of whom said they had paid up to 2,000 euros or more as a "donation" towards logistics costs.

The U.N.-Red Cross report said the interviews suggested 85 of the children came from villages in the Adre and Tine zones of eastern Chad on the border with Sudan's Darfur region. It did not specify whether they were Chadians or Sudanese.

"Their state of health is not, for the moment, a cause for concern," the agencies said in the joint report, adding that some of them had received treatment for "minor injuries".

The U.N. agencies and the Red Cross said the young age of the children made obtaining precise details about their origin difficult, but they would continue the efforts.

The case has triggered outrage among Chadians, with many on the barren border with Sudan questioning the motives of scores of foreign aid groups that work with Darfur refugees.

The four-year-old conflict in Sudan's Darfur has spilled violence and refugees over the border into eastern Chad and around 400,000 Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadian civilians are sheltering in U.N.-run camps. Nationality is sometimes difficult to establish in an ethnically-mixed region.