Chad handed over 84 child soldiers captured during a rebel offensive last month to the UN children's organisation UNICEF Friday, an AFP journalist witnessed.
The children were among 236 prisoners of war captured as government troops repelled rebels who had entered the east of the country from Sudan, said Defence Minister General Kamougue Wadal Abdelkader.
The handover took place at a ceremony attend by Alpha Oumar Konare, former president of Mali and a past president of the African Union, and Foreign Minister Moussa Faki Mahamat.
The children will be looked after at a centre in the capital Ndjamena, said Dimitri Papathanassiou, UNICEF's representative in Chad.
Both UNICEF and the Chadian authorities would do everything they could to find the children's families and their communities so they could be returned to their previous life, said Mahamat.
The rebel Union of Forces of Resistance (UFR) launched an offensive on May 4 from the Sudanese side of Chad's eastern border with the declared intention of capturing Ndjamena and ousting President Idriss Deby Itno.
But by the end of the week, the Chadian army had pushed back the rebels, after two days of fierce fighting in which Ndjamena says 247 people were killed, all but 22 of them rebels.
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