A Bulgarian Roma woman has undergone a DNA test in order to establish the truth of her claims to be the biological mother of a blonde girl known as Maria who was removed from a Roma settlement near Farsala last week in Greece.
The woman called Sasha Ruseva has claimed to have given birth to the girl in January 2009 at a hospital in Lamia, central Greece.
According to her claims on Bulgarian TV, she gave the child to a Greek Roma couple as she was unable to support it financially in addition to the 10 children she already has. Ms Ruseva rebuffed reports that she received 250 euros in cash in exchange for the child.
Her remarks seem to match those of the Roma couple who had posed as Maria’s parents, and are now in custody pending trial for abduction. The pair had told Greek police that they adopted Maria from a Bulgarian Roma woman in Athens in 2009.
This week Interpol issued a yellow notice in the case of Maria, and said that the girl was not on its list of 610 missing children, based on a DNA test.
Greek authorities believe that Maria may have ended up at the Farsala camp following a crackdown on illegal adoptions in Bulgaria in the 2008-2010 period.
In the meantime, Supreme Court prosecutor Efterpi Koutzamani this week ordered a nationwide investigation into birth certificates issued in the past six years following the discovery of Maria.
Ms Koutzamani ordered the inquiry into all birth certificates issued after January 1, 2008, amid news reports of benefit fraud by families across Greece.
At the same time police vowed to step up law enforcement in Roma settlements across Greece but deny that its the raids are related to the Maria case.
Human rights groups have criticised the large-scale police operations, which took place in various Roma camps in the areas of Perea and Diavata in Thessaloniki and Zefyri and Auliza in Acharnes, northern Athens, this week, which resulted in a total of 156 detentions and 10 arrests.
Police say that in the first nine months of this year, 1,131 police operations in Roma camps took place in the whole country. As a result of these operations 19,067 people were detained, 1,305 were arrested and 4,651 violations were confirmed.
Sources ekathimerini, enetenglish