Is this some other poor parent's Maddie? Police appeal for help identifying blonde girl, 4

[twinkles**stars]

• Unidentified girl found living in a Roma gypsy camp in central Greece
• Man, 39, and woman, 40, arrested and charged with abducting a minor
• The girl has fair hair and pale skin and bears no resemblance to them
  
• DNA testing proved she was not related to the couple
  
• Charity now caring for the girl requests global hunt to find her real parents

Who is she? Police are appealing for help identifying this four-year-old girl who was found on a gypsy camp in Greece after she was allegedly abducted

Greek authorities have requested international help to identify a four-year-old girl found living in appalling conditions in a gypsy camp with a couple whom they have arrested and charged with abducting her.

The child was found on Wednesday near Farsala in central Greece during a routine search of the camp by police looking for drugs and weapons.

The girl reportedly sparked one of the officer's curiosity as she is blonde, pale skinned and bore no resemblance to the other Roma children or the couple who claimed to be her parents.

A 39-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman have been arrested and charged with abducting a minor.

Police said they offered conflicting accounts about the girl, one claiming that she was found in a blanket, the other claiming she had been handed to them by strangers.

Police said today that DNA testing proved the girl, who is believed to be called Maria, was not related to the couple.

'Her features suggest that she might be from an eastern or northern (European) country,' regional police chief Panayiotis Tzavaras said.

Police have notified Interpol for assistance.

Detectives say they also found drugs and unregistered firearms in other parts of the settlement, which is about 280 kilometers (170 miles) north of Athens.

The police statement said the couple claimed to have a total 14 children, and had registered different numbers with authorities in three different parts of Greece.

Officers found three minors living with them in the settlement who appear to be their children - although that hasn't yet been verified by DNA testing.

The case bears a disturbing similarity to theories about the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann, who went missing on a family holiday in Portugal on May 3, 2007.

The girl is now in the care of the charity 'A child's smile,' which said today it has sought the assistance of European and global groups for lost or abused children in tracking her parents.

More...

• Detectives probing Madeleine McCann disappearance receive another 150 calls after fresh appeal on Du...
• Who did the key witness see? Police say it is possible that family saw Maddie being taken by her abd...

She does not speak other languages than Roma but appears to understand Greek and is being communicated with by sign language.

She was said to traumatised when she arrived at her care home but has since settled and is living in a safe family environment with other children of her age.

Distress: Dirty and grimacing as her photo is taken, the little girl is now the centre of an international appeal. Authorities hope her parents can be found so the family can be reunited

Police said the child was found near Farsala in central Greece during a crackdown on illegal activities by Roma

A medical examination is ongoing.

Panayiotis Pardalis, a spokesman for the charity, said: 'It was obvious that she was not a Roma girl.

'She was afraid and under some psychological pressure when she arrived. Colleagues have been trying to communicate but are struggling.

'She seems to understand Greek but cannot speak it. She was living under bad conditions and was very dirty but is now safe.'

Charity director Costas Giannopoulos said the child was undergoing medical examinations.

'We are shocked by how easy it is for people to register children as their own,' he told private Skai TV.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2465942/Is-poor-parent-s-Maddie-Police-appeal-help-identifyi...
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[azureline**]

I disagree too..... they need to know it is unacceptable to keep having 8 to 10 children just because they can........and keep them filthy, poorly clothed and fed, uneducated.............

[cherry*135]

Also unacceptable to sell or give your own children away or accept/buy a child that doesn't belong to you without going through the proper channels. Anyone that accepts a baby that is not theirs runs the risk of having it taken off them further down the track if they haven't legally adopted the child.

[izabsmiling]

Roma, Feared as Kidnappers, See Their Own Children at Risk

...Whatever the outcome, the Roma say that it is they who now live in fear — of having their children snatched for no reason other .than their cultural identity or skin color. The cases, they say, have helped fan a sometimes violent backlash against the roughly 11 million Roma scattered across Europe. In an era of budget cutbacks and high unemployment, politicians on both the left and the right have singled out the Roma as emblematic of the problems of illegal immigration and have questioned whether they can ever be integrated

“Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest. “The most dangerous consequence of the hysteria is that now we have to live in fear that our children can be removed from us on the basis of a wrong perception. No one should be profiled on the basis of their ethnicity.”

Mr. Gergely, a human rights lawyer who has a Roma father and a white Romanian mother, noted that many Roma, who arrived in Europe from India centuries ago and are also known as Gypsies, came from mixed families.

Mr. Gergely, whose musician father worked long days in a restaurant to help pay for his son’s law school education, said such statistics made the necessity for Roma role models imperative. But he said he feared that recent scaremongering about the Roma threatened to push successful Roma underground.

“Many Roma are very anxious about identifying themselves as Roma, because there is a feeling that if you declare your ethnicity, you might suffer,” he said. “In most cases when Roma succeed, they prefer to remain invisible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/world/europe/for-the-roma-fears-of-kidnapping-in-europe-only-mirro...

http://www.coe.int/t/commissioner/source/prems/prems79611_GBR_CouvHumanRightsOfRoma_WEB.pdf

Serbia: Skinheads try to abduct fair-skinned child from Romani family

http://www.romea.cz/en/news/world/serbia-skinheads-try-to-abduct-fair-skinned-child-from-romani-fami...

Italy's far-right Northern League party has called for inspections of all Roma communities in the country after a Roma couple was charged with abducting a girl dubbed the "blonde angel" in Greece.

 http://www.thelocal.it/20131023/blonde-angel-sparks-call-for-roma-camp-sweeps%20

http://www.coe.int/t/commissioner/source/prems/prems79611_GBR_CouvHumanRightsOfRoma_WEB.pdf

children are kidnapped around the world ....

the answer is not to take/kidnap the children  Roma parents just because their child may be fair of skin/hair  and mark all such parents as kidnappers .My kids don't all have my colouring ...they are all mine .

and if I lived in a Country and a women couldn;t take care of her baby and I could ..I would .

[izabsmiling]

Aboriginal Identity: Who is ‘Aboriginal’?

People who identify themselves as ‘Aboriginal’ range from dark-skinned, broad-nosed to blonde-haired, blue-eyed people.

Aboriginal people define Aboriginality not by skin colour but by relationships.

Light-skinned Aboriginal people often face challenges on their Aboriginal identity because of stereotyping.

Read more: http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/aboriginal-identity-who-is-aboriginal#ixzz2...

[patchoo78]

I"m not sure that woman knows how Albinism works... You don't lose your racial features just because you're Albino. Albino Africans still look African. The blonde kid maybe could be Albino, but that red haired kid does not look Bulgarian

[patchoo78]

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@**meep** wrote:

i think Supernova is right, its most probably henna.

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Hena is usually brown, not bright red

[icyfroth]

All this scaremongering that the Gypsys might have their fair-skinned children seized from them.

Don't forget that the Madeleine McCann investigation has been re-opened, and the search is on for a fair-skinned, fair-haired girl aged 7. That's why little blond Maria was taken and DNA tested. Not because there's some sort of "stolen generation" pogrom to take blond children from their dark-skinned Gypsy parents

Had she been proven to be the Greek's child, she would have been returned, as were the blond Irish Gypsy children.

I think it's only right that police follow up any leads and suspicions if it means that parents like the McCanns and the Needhams might be reunited with their missing children.

[i-need-a-martini]

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@azureline** wrote:

I disagree too..... they need to know it is unacceptable to keep having 8 to 10 children just because they can........and keep them filthy, poorly clothed and fed, uneducated.............

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Who needs to know it is unnacceptable??

This child looked extremely healthy and well fed. Her clothes were clean. Her hair was clean. We don't know that she wasn't being educated. 

So her fingers were dirty (maybe cause she was playing) and she had her hair tips dyed. None of those things point to a child that isn't being taken care of. And who are we to say how many children any woman can have?

[i-need-a-martini]

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@izabsmiling wrote:

and if I lived in a Country and a women couldn;t take care of her baby and I could ..I would .

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I think this is also an interesting point. 

I read a book recently about a Somalians girl who arrived in the UK as a refugee. Her father was murdered and her mother and a female neighbour made the trek out of Somalia. She was 8 at the time. At some stage her Somalian mother abandoned her and the trek but she continued on her neighbour who passed her off as her own. As far as the girl (and then woman) was concerned, the neighbour WAS her mother.

She talks about how any sense of abandonment was lost when she arrived in a refugee camp and discovered that so many adults had simply taken on the care of abandoned or orphaned children instinctively and there were many others like her.

Like I said somewhere way up top, I think this happens much more often than we would ever understand.

[**meep**]

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@patchoo78 wrote:

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@**meep** wrote:

i think Supernova is right, its most probably henna.

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Hena is usually brown, not bright red

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That would depend on the hair colour it was applied on.  The child with bright orange hair is obviously naturally blond.

My aunty used henna, her hair was always red.