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N'DJAMENA, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Lawyers in Chad applied for bail on Thursday on behalf of six humanitarian activists held in Chad on child abduction charges after they were arrested two weeks ago trying to fly 103 African children to Europe.

"We have ... requested for each of the six French people in detention to be freed. The judge has 10 days to give his decision," Mario Stasi, one of their defence lawyers, told reporters outside the law courts in Chad's capital N'Djamena.

The six are members of Zoe's Ark, a French organisation which has said the children were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region, across Chad's eastern border.

U.N. officials say almost all of the children came from villages on the border and had at least one living parent.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew in on Sunday to pick up three French journalists and four Spanish air stewardesses who had been charged as accessories to the crimes.

Three male members of the Spanish air crew and a Belgian pilot remain in custody on the same charges, along with several Chadians.

The investigating judge met on Thursday the Zoe's Ark suspects and a Chadian suspect who worked as their interpreter.

"The interpreter, who is in effect the one who denounced everybody, was forced to admit that when he was translating he indeed said that they were children who came from Darfur," Stasi said.

"If that is true, it is he who has deceived everybody." (Reporting by Stephanie Hancock; writing by Alistair Thomson; editing by Robert Woodward)

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