Man Says he Offered to Snatch Beirut Children for Aussie TV Show, Suspects Charged
A contractor said Tuesday that he negotiated with an Australian television network to snatch two Lebanese-Australian children from their father's family in Beirut but the network chose a cheaper option.
Col Chapman, who describes himself as a child recovery specialist, said executives at the Nine Network's "60 Minutes" program told him to "sharpen his pencil" when he quoted them 150,000 Australian dollars ($114,000) late last year to get the children Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, out of Lebanon.
The children's Australian mother, Sally Faulkner, a four-member crew from Nine, two British agents from the Britain-based Child Abduction Recovery International company, known as CARI, and two Lebanese men are in police custody in Beirut over a bungled attempt last week to smuggle the children out of the country.
A state prosecutor in Lebanon filed on Tuesday kidnapping charges against the suspects.
After issuing the charges against them, Mount Lebanon Prosecutor Judge Claude Karam referred them to the first military examining magistrate.
The TV crew, including presenter Tara Brown, were recording from a car window on April 6 as the two CARI agents grabbed the children from their grandmother Ibtissam Berri and a domestic servant in the area of Hadath south of Beirut.
Chapman said his business Child Recovery Australia would never allow a media client to direct their operations during a child recovery attempt to suit filming priorities and deadlines.
"The reason '60' didn't go with us is we were dearer and we don't work with media, not in that sense, anyway," Chapman said.
Nine refused to say if it paid for CARI's bid to retrieve the children. Faulkner accuses her former husband Ali al-Amin of taking them from Australia last year without her permission.
"We don't ever talk about payment in relation to a story," network spokeswoman Victoria Buchan said.
She declined to say if the network had ever been in negotiations with Chapman.
Lebanese authorities had a signed statement from one of the CARI agents in custody that said the network had paid AU$115,000 for the operation, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
The custody dispute between Faulkner, 29, and he ex-husband has been going on for several years, and Australia media have reported that he took the two children to Lebanon for a holiday last year but did not return.
Source: Associated Press, Naharnet
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