The 103 children caught up in an abduction scandal in Chad wait at an orphanage, unable to return home despite most having been identified as the probe continues into the French charity accused of trying to spirit them to Europe.
They spend their time playing games and they cry far less than they did when they first arrived late last month, officials said.
The youngest among the children is 14 months, the oldest nine. Many are under five.
"Sixty-five children have been identified and their identity verified," said Honore About, head of the team identifying the children and looking for their parents.
But even they cannot return home yet since it is up to the authorities in the capital N'Djamena, where the child abduction investigation has been unfolding, to determine when they can be released.
Six French workers from the Zoe's Ark charity, which attempted to fly the children out of Chad to France, remain in jail in Chad in connection with the case.
Zoe's Ark says the children were orphans from neighboring Sudan's war-torn Darfur region who it planned to place in foster care with families in Europe.
But Chad says the group did not have permission to take the children out of the country, and aid agencies who have since cared for them said most of the youngsters are Chadian and have at least one living parent.
Identifying all the children is expected to take time, and Chadian officials are working with limited resources.
Some of the children don't know their full names, About said.
Much depends on observation, and officials rely on children's reactions when identifying parents.
"When someone says they are a father or mother of a child ... we bring them to the orphanage, we put them in a corner, and we bring in the children," the prosecutor said. "If a child goes to the person, that means a lot."
One of the children, Abakar Mahamat Adam, who said he didn't know his age, was puzzled by the circumstances that brought him to the orphanage.
"White people brought us here," he said.
"They said that they were going to bring us to school," Adam said.
His father has come to Abeche, but the boy wants to return to his Chadian village near the border with Sudan.
"Here, things are good," he said. "There, it's better."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.