The next morning, a "very alert officer" from the Daytona Beach Police Department spotted the men's 1988 Pontiac station wagon parked in Daytona Beach early in the morning, Special Agent Bill Cheek of the Jacksonville, Fla., FBI office said in an interview Friday.

Officers fanned out over the area and a detective spotted the men and the girls walking along the beach front. The men were arrested after they entered a gift shop at about 9:30 a.m., Cheek said.

At 4:15 that afternoon the three men were charged under the federal kidnapping statute. If convicted they face "any term of years up to life," Cheek said.

Police declined to release Lee Stafford's name because he is a minor, but Reuters reported that he is being charged with kidnapping under Michigan state law, which would allow him to be tried as an adult.

The Hainer sisters were given baths, examined by doctors and referred to counselors, Reuters reported.

Tuesday night, the girls were flown back home to Michigan, where, hugging teddy bears, they were greeted by their grandmother at the airport.

"The girls are safe," Special Agent Joseph D. Martinolich Jr. of the FBI's Detroit office said at a Tuesday news conference in Kalamazoo, Mich. "We were told by the agents at the scene that they're none the worse for the wear. Maybe a little tired, a little bedraggled, maybe disheveled, but they're in good shape."

However, investigators who interviewed the girls and the men testified last week that at least one of the girls had been sexually molested.

At a bond hearing Wednesday, Daytona Beach Detective John Adazzio testified that Jessica Hainer said Ronald Stafford, the girls' former baby-sitter, molested her in a Daytona Beach hotel room after the abduction.

Adazzio also testified that a medical examination of the six-year-old showed no evidence of penetration, and that Theresa Hainer said she was not molested.

Also at the hearing, FBI Agent James Dougal testified that Geer said Ronald Stafford had fondled the breast areas of one or both girls and had taken one of them into the woods for an hour.

Dougal also testified that Ronald Stafford said his brother and Geer had pinched the girls in the buttocks and grabbed their legs.

Ronald Stafford's attorney denied that his client had molested the girls. Although Ronald Stafford has a juvenile record for sexual assault, his attorney said it was only for stabbing a boy in the buttocks with a needle.

The FBI would not comment on possible motives for the kidnapping.

But Dougal testified that Ronald Stafford told him the three men had planned the abduction for two weeks because they suspected abuse on the part of the girls' father. The father, Jesse Hainer, said he had known Stafford for more than a year but later told him to keep away from the girls.