BANGUI, June 26 (Reuters) - The lawless Central African Republic is becoming a magnet for armed groups and bandits from across the region who are looting, killing and kidnapping children for money, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

The human rights watchdog said crises in neighbouring Sudan and eastern Chad were distracting attention from the CAR, and urged the United Nations to deploy peacekeepers to prevent a total collapse of order.

Rebel groups are fighting a low-intensity war in the north against President Francois Bozize, who seized power in 2003.

"The northern areas in particular have become a free-for-all -- a hunting ground for the region's various armed opposition forces, government troops and even armed bandits -- some of whom come from as far away as West Africa," Amnesty researcher Godfrey Byaruhanga wrote in a report after visiting the region.

Relief workers say violence by rebels, government troops and bandits has driven 300,000 civilians from their homes.

Amnesty's researchers met Central African families in refugee camps in southern Chad whose children -- some as young as three years old -- had been held to ransom by bandits for up to 2 million CFA francs ($4,100).

Some wealthier cattle-owning families had had children kidnapped as many as seven times and had been left destitute. Children were killed if their parents could not pay.

"News is clearly spreading to criminal elements throughout the region that they can have free rein in northern CAR, as there is an almost total absence of any authority," Byaruhanga wrote.

CAR is ranked as the sixth poorest country on earth in the U.N. development index. It has been riven by conflict and military uprisings ever since independence from France in 1960.

The U.N. children's agency UNICEF says a quarter of the CAR's 4 million inhabitants have suffered from the effects of civil war or the conflicts in Sudan's Darfur region and Chad.

The United Nations suspended operations in the remote northwest this month after a French aid worker was shot dead in her car.

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