Seven Europeans charged with complicity in the attempt to kidnap 103 purported Darfuri orphans were released Sunday after French President Nicolas Sarkozy jetted into Chad for talks with Chadian President Idriss Deby.

Three French journalists and four Spanish stewardesses were released upon Sarkozy's arrival in the Chadian capital N'Djamena, and left on his plane some two hours after he landed, French media said.

The detained journalists had accompanied six members of the French aid group L'Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark), who attempted to fly the 103 children to France, to be housed by European host families. The stewardesses were part of a seven-member Spanish flight crew on the aircraft leased to transport the children.

Deby and Sarkozy met for an hour in N'Djemena. After the talks, the French president called for the six French aid workers still jailed in Chad to be tried in France, France-Info radio said.

The six are charged with kidnapping minors and fraud, and face maximum jail sentences of 20 years of hard labour if they are convicted in Chad.

According to French media reports, Sarkozy only agreed to travel to N'Djamena after having been assured of the release of the seven detainees.

Sarkozy played down fears that the affair would jeopardize a European mission on the Chad-Sudan border, scheduled for November, to safeguard camps holding refugees from the Darfur conflict.

"This appalling undertaking" has "nothing to do" with the deployment of the European troops, he told journalists in N'Djemena.

L'Arche de Zoe claimed that all the children were orphans from Darfur and that it had planned to settle the children, aged between one and ten, with families in Europe.

Relief workers and the French foreign ministry have said that most of the children were neither orphans nor from Darfur.

On Saturday, French Prime Minster Francois Fillon charged Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Defence Minister Herve Morin to jointly lead an investigation into the affair.