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Belgian arrives home after Chad detention
10 Nov 2007 19:47:33 GMT
Source: Reuters
(adds pilot arriving in Brussels; previous N'DJAMENA)

MELSBROEK, Belgium, Nov 10 (Reuters) - A 74-year-old Belgian pilot, who had been detained in Chad over an attempt to fly 103 African children to Europe, arrived home on Saturday by military jet.

Jacques Wilmart, freed by Chadian authorities on Friday, was flown by the Belgian military to Melsbroek military base on the outskirts of Brussels. He was taken away by ambulance after having suffered heart problems earlier this week.

Wilmart had remained at the French military base in Chad convalescing after suffering heart problems on Thursday. An ambulance took him to the airport in the Chadian capital N'Djamena earlier on Saturday, witnesses said.

"When you love Africa, you can never get over it," Wilmart told reporters from inside the ambulance, before being helped to the plane. "I am happy to be going back, but part of my heart will always remain with you (here)."

The Belgian was arrested last month in eastern Chad and charged as an accomplice of six French members of a humanitarian activist group calling itself Zoe's Ark, which Chadian authorities accuse of trying to take the children out of the country illegally.

Wilmart flew the children from the Sudanese border area to the eastern Chadian town of Abeche, from where a Spanish charter flight was due to carry them to France.

The six French citizens still in custody have been charged with fraud and abduction.

The final three members of the Spanish air crew arrived back in Madrid on Friday after Chadian authorities decided they could not be linked to child abduction or trafficking. Four Spanish stewardesses had already been freed.

U.N. officials say almost all of the infants aged from one to 10 came from villages on the Chad-Sudan border and had at least one living parent.

The case has stirred anger in Chad, and other parts of Africa, against what many see as overbearing Western charity organisations.

Scores of people demonstrated in N'Djamena on Saturday against Zoe's Ark and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, who angered Chadian authorities by promising to bring home the remaining French citizens. (Reporting by Stephanie Hancock in N'Djamena and Marine Hass in Brussels; writing by Daniel Flynn in Dakar and David Lawsky in Brussels)


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Last updated:Sat Nov 10 19:46:20 2007