DAKAR?A Dakar court sentenced seven Koranic teachers to six months probation Wednesday for forcing pupils to beg, a first in the majority Muslim country which recently banned begging in public places.

The accused, six Senegalese and one from Guinea-Bissau, were also fined 100,000 francs (150 euros) in what Human Rights Watch said was the first ever application of a 2005 law outlawing the practice.

Barefoot, in oversized and ragged clothing, scores of children as young as four or five clutching a tin move in groups through Dakar, swarming passers-by for a bit of change, sugar or rice.

They bring their takings back to their religious teachers who keep them on the streets as much as seven days a week, with the threat of punishment if they do not return with their daily quota.

However since August 25, when government banned begging in the capital, permitting charity only outside places of worship, the ever-present talibes (disciples) have dispersed.

Prime Minister Souleymane Ndiaye, when announcing the ban, said: "Senegal is under threat from its partners who feel we are not fighting human trafficking effectively."

The seven religious teachers were arrested after testimony from children between the ages of six and 16 who were rounded up by police after the ban.

During the trial defense lawyers pleaded for leniency, arguing that according to tradition, Koranic teachers around the country have always made their pupils beg, and the State had previously tolerated the offense.

"This conviction is a first and it will have a resounding effect," said Malik Fall, a lawyer for the accused.

"In our argument we emphasized the shortcomings of the State which has left Koranic education completely on the margins, without subsidy, without identification and without control," said Fall.

In April, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said at least 50,000 talibes were "forced to beg on Senegal?s streets for long hours, seven days a week, by often brutally abusive Koranic teachers, known as marabouts."

Dakar-based researcher Matthew Wells told AFP that while the "punishment was slight... the arrest and conviction of these men represent an important step towards the end of exploitation of vulnerable children under the guise of religious teaching."

Two years ago, the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, estimated that there were 8,000 children on the streets of Dakar.

Outside the court, 41-year-old contractor Ahmed Diagne defended the practice of sending pupils on the streets to beg.

"They should not stop them (the religious instructors), they have not sinned. They taught the Koran to the children and, in return, students would beg, because the Koranic schools are not subsidized and that's the whole problem."

The NGO World Vision says the exploitation started with a centuries old practice of sending a male child to study the Koran with a marabout or religious scholar.

To learn humility and what it means to be poor the children were sometimes sent to ask neighbours for food, but were not required to beg for money.

However poverty has led more and more rural parents, who are unable to support their children, to hand them over to marabouts in these religious schools, known as daaras, to receive a religious and moral education.

HRW said children often spend four times as many hours begging as they do studying the Koran, which is often just a cover for economic exploitation of the children.