Former road racing star Wayne Gardner
is “pissed off” at an Australian charity he supported with a
$5,000 donation because it’s involved with the group of French
charity workers who were caught trying to smuggle 103 children out of
Africa recently.
Gardner gave the money to Zoe’s Ark Foundation, an
Australian group, in order to assist their efforts at providing aid
to Indonesia after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami disaster.
But the
group turns out to be associated with the French charity l’Arche de
Zoe, whose “child rescue” operation was foiled when many of the
Sudanese war orphans they tried to take to France were discovered to
be healthy kids with living parents in the African nation of Chad.
Some of the workers are under arrest and face long prison terms.
Gardner, who won the 500 GP World Championship in 1987, was furious
when he learned that the French l’Arche de Zoe was an offshoot of the
Australian Zoe’s Ark.
“I’m not very happy to be associated with
it,” he told The Australian newspaper. “In fact, I am quite
pissed off.”
