Lawyer representing the couple tells Larissa court it was an adoption, but 'not exactly legal'
Five days after a blonde, blue-eyed girl was found living in a Roma camp in Greece, the couple accused of abducting her were imprisoned on Monday pending trial, as police released a picture of the child seated between the couple.
As representatives from Greece's Roma community gathered outside the courthouse in Larissa, central Greece, specialists continued the painstaking business of trying to identify the girl known only as Maria.
"From medical examinations conducted by a forensic pathologist we now know that she is older than we thought and is probably five or six," said Panaghiotis Partelis at Smile of the Child, the charity tasked with looking after her. "She is still in hospital but she seems to be happy and playing with her toys, doing what all girls of her age do."
The philanthropic organisation was still receiving thousands of calls from around the world, often from people whose children had gone missing, as part of a wider campaign to trace the girl's real parents, he said.
Authorities released the photograph, which portrays the pale-skinned child wedged between the couple and clasping a water bottle, after a court announced there was enough evidence to suggest she had been kidnapped.
DNA tests have proved conclusively that the girl bears no relation to either the 40-year-old woman or 39-year-old man. But the pair, arrested when police conducted a wider crackdown on illegal activities in the Roma community and raided the camp outside Larissa, continued to deny allegations that they had abducted her.
They told a magistrate on Monday they took the girl under their wing within days of her birth because her real mother had been unable to take care of the baby. "It was an adoption that was not exactly legal but took place with the mother's consent," said Constantinos Katsavos, a lawyer representing the couple.
A senior Roma representative supported that claim, telling reporters the girl's biological mother was Bulgarian. "This family got the child from Bulgarians. I know them personally. All the rest they are saying, that they snatched her because she is blonde and blue eyed to beg on the streets, are lies," said Manolis Sainopoulos, the deputy head of the Panhellenic Federation of Roma. "Right now she is in hospital and suffering because she misses the woman she regards as her mother."
With the discovery of the little girl gripping the country, the case has highlighted the profound mistrust between the Roma community and Greeks. In a society that takes pride in its homogeneity, Roma are among Greece's most marginalised minorities.
But sources insisted on Monday that court officials were not persuaded by the couple's assertions. The father, who has a criminal record, has given conflicting accounts of how the pair, who have 14 offspring, came to possess the child. The mother, who was found to have two identities, raised further suspicions when it was discovered she had claimed to have given birth to six of her children in the space of 10 months. Panayiotis Beis, Athens's deputy mayor, said: "This is a clear-cut example of people exploiting a gap in the law to obtain falsified birth certificates." Municipal officials say the couple could have claimed up to €2,700 (£2,290) in welfare benefits for the children.
Police are also investigating whether the girl, who speaks almost no Greek and converses in the Roma dialect, ended up in the couple's hands as a result of a child-trafficking network in the Balkans. Bulgarian women have been targeted as part of a wider operation of children being stolen to order. Greeks are known to have procured such babies for about €25,000.
The girl, who has come to embody the plight of missing children internationally, is expected to remain in hospital until experts, including an anthropologist, conduct further tests to determine her origins. Although there are lingering doubts, officials say her features suggest she is northern European.
"At first she was in shock and very reluctant to even smile," said Maria Petropoulou, a psychologist with Smile of the Child. "It has taken time for her to gain our trust as it will take time for her to adapt to her new surroundings."
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