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Edit: We have amended the wording of the headline to ‘child smuggling’…

On Roeland Street, on the edge of the Cape Town CBD, French couple Eric Breteau and Emilie Lelouch (pictured above) run The Big Box Café.

It’s proven to be very popular since its opening back in 2015, when it was touted as Cape Town’s first board games café.

Here’s a little bit of info from the ‘About Us’ section on the café’s site:

The Big Box is a sister company of La Grosse Boite, a boardgames café in La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast in France. After a six-year run in the European town, the company spread it’s wings and so, in 2015, two more shops were born; on in Rochefort, France and the other right here in Gardens, Cape Town.

The people behind The Big Box are passionate about gaming and are always excited to be part of projects where people can share, learn, discover and have fun in the big and exciting world of board games.

Board games are great, so no problem there, but then a Reddit thread started yesterday exposed the startling backstory of Eric and Emilie.

The thread, titled “The Child Traffickers of Big Box Cafe”, comes with this description:

They have been found guilty in the French courts and have been sentenced to two years in prison for their attempt in 2007 to illegally smuggle 103 children, who they falsely claimed were orphans, out of Chad and to France where “families” were waiting to “adopt them”. The couple stated in court that they were under “heavy pressure” to get those children to France.

Links are provided to a number of articles detailing their crimes.

Let’s start with the BBC, who covered what is known as the ‘Zoe’s Ark Case’:

Two French charity workers have been sentenced to two years in prison for illegally trying to fly 103 African children from Chad to France in 2007.

Eric Breteau, who founded Zoe’s Ark, and his partner Emilie Lelouch had been tried in absentia but appeared in the Paris court for Tuesday’s verdict…

The children were said to have been orphans from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, but turned out to be mainly from Chad and with families of their own.

In a case that shocked France, the defendants were arrested in Chad as they tried to load the children on to a plane bound for France in 2007.

They were sentenced later that year to eight years’ hard labour by a court in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, but repatriated to France after receiving a pardon from Chad’s president in March 2008.

The court that handed that guilty verdict down went as far as to say that the pair “could not have been unaware of the illegality of their project,” adding that they had “knowingly lied to their families”.

You can read that full BBC report here, but we’ll move on to the Guardian’s coverage of the same case:

Bréteau and Lelouch were arrested with 13 others in October 2007 at Abéché airport, on Chad’s eastern border with Sudan. Local authorities had become suspicious after a charter plane with a Spanish airline crew landed at the remote airport.

Police pounced when the French charity workers arrived and tried to board with a crowd of children ranging from toddlers to 10-year-olds who were wearing fake bandages to make them look ill and who had not been declared to officials.

Dozens of families, mainly French, had paid between €2,800 and €6,000 to the charity to house a child from wartorn Darfur. The would-be parents, recruited on online adoption forums, waited at an airport east of Paris with warm clothing for the children, having prepared bedrooms and new lives for them.

Read that one more time – fake bandages to make them look ill and who had not been declared to officials.

When Unicef and the Red Cross investigated, they found that “at least 85% of the children still had living parents and were from Chad, not Sudan”.

This is also from the Guardian:

During the trial, Isabelle Rile, a doctor who visited the charity’s camp in Abéché, said she had realised that the children were almost all from the local region in Chad.

She said one day the children started crying and a girl asked for her mother. The children had thought they had been brought to Abéché to go to school, she said. When she confronted Bréteau and another doctor, she told the court, “they told me the children were unhappy, that they were in Africa”.

For those who prefer investigative TV segments, here’s Al Jazeera’s Inside Story from back in 2013:

The Reddit thread was first widely shared on Twitter, before making its way onto Facebook. One Reddit user who shared the story on Facebook detailed Eric’s response in these screenshots:

The couple was described by a Paris judge as “megalomaniacs”, which “caused them to laugh as they sat in court”.

According to the Guardian report referenced earlier:

They had not been present at their trial in December, preferring to stay in South Africa where they ran a guest house, tourist flight tours and a circus troop. But they unexpectedly arrived in court for sentencing amid speculation that an international arrest warrant would have been issued.

It appears that they did have their sentence lightened upon appeal in France (“the judge convicted them of fraud and being intermediaries for illegal adoption for their role – details here), having avoided the eight years’ hard labour handed down by a Chadian court due to a pardon from Chad’s president in March 2008.

For those who like to know a little more about the places they frequent and where they spend their money, now you do.

[sources:bigboxcafe&reddit&bbc&guardian]