The mystery of a toddler “blond angel” found living in Greece with a Roma couple took a new twist on Saturday when the pair’s lawyer said the girl’s mother gave her up at birth.
The little girl, thought to be about four years old with blond hair and green eyes, was found by police on Wednesday in a camp in the central town of Farsala.
DNA testing has shown the child is not related to the couple, who have been arrested.
Speaking to media about the girl’s biological mother, a lawyer for the Roma couple, Marietta Palavra, said: “We’re talking about a woman who could not raise this child and who gave it to the couple in 2009 through a third party shortly after her birth.”
“There has been no kidnapping, no robbery, no trafficking,” added her colleague, Konstantinos Katsavos, who also represents the 40-year-old woman and her husband, 39. “They did not buy the child.”
The discovery of the girl gave hope to the parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann that they will find her alive, their spokesman said earlier.
Greek police are looking to question the biological mother, who the couple’s lawyers say does not have Greek citizenship, to confirm the story.
Police said they would seek assistance from Interpol to identify the girl in a Europe-wide search.
Lawyers hope that relatives of the girl will be found before the couple is questioned by a judge in the central city of Larissa today and possibly charged for “abducting a minor.”
Police said the couple had repeatedly changed their version of how the girl, who was undergoing medical exams at a hospital on Saturday, came to live with them.
Press reported that the couple claimed they found the girl abandoned outside a supermarket and in another version said they had obtained the child from her Bulgarian mother.
Yet Katsavos said they had “not made an official deposition so far.”
The girl, said to be about four years old, is expected to stay with The Smile of a Child charity after she is discharged from hospital, organization head Kostas Giannopoulos told reporters.
“The girl is more at peace” than when police took her away from the camp, he said. “For the first time she is with people who care for her.”
The girl’s discovery came days after a television program was broadcast in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands about the case of Madeleine McCann.
Kate and Gerry McCann have been searching for their daughter since May 2007, when she vanished from their holiday apartment in Portugal’s Praia da Luz resort while the couple were at dinner.
Madeleine was a few days shy of her fourth birthday at the time.
The McCanns launched a global campaign to find the daughter and last week issued a fresh appeal with the television program.
After the show, British detectives said they had received more than 2,400 calls and e-mails, while the German and Dutch broadcasts sparked hundreds of similar responses.
Witnesses said the men, seen “lurking” around the apartment complex before her disappearance, were speaking German or Dutch.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema