A friend was in Romania on business for 10 days last month and says nothing has changed and the Gypsys are still hated as thieves, lazy and working the system. Human life continues to be just another commodity, lord knows where this little girl came from and would have ended up... ................................................................................................................................................................ ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek police have asked Interpol to help them track down the real parents of a blonde girl with green eyes who was found in a Roma (Gypsy) camp in central Greece. Known as Maria, the four-year-old was spotted peeking out from under a blanket at a Roma settlement near the town of Farsala during a police sweep on Wednesday for suspected drug trafficking. She speaks just a few words in the Roma dialect and Greek, and police think she may be of northern or eastern European origin, possibly from Scandinavia or Bulgaria. Police have sent Interpol a file with all the evidence they have on the girl, including DNA samples, to seek a possible match with its records on missing children, a police official said. They have also contacted international groups and charities that deal with lost or abducted children."Mystery - a blonde angel without an identity," top-selling daily Ta Nea wrote on its front page on Saturday. Photos released by police of Maria staring blankly at the camera with muddy hands and scruffy pigtails have dominated the media. Parallels were drawn to the case of Briton Madeleine McCann, who vanished while on holiday in Portugal in 2007, when she was three years old. DNA tests have shown the couple in the Roma camp with whom Maria was living were not her biological parents. The 40-year-old woman and 39-year-old man have been arrested and charged with abducting a minor, and police are investigating whether the girl was a victim of trafficking. CRYING AND FRIGHTENED During questioning, the couple gave at least five conflicting accounts of how the child ended up with them, including that she was found outside a supermarket, police said. The woman had two different identification documents and other papers suggested the couple had up to 14 children, but six were registered as having been born within less than 10 months. They received 2,790 euros ($3,800) a month in child benefits, a police source said. "This has never happened before - to have found the child and to be looking for the parents," said Natalie Karakouliafi of the Smile of the Child charity, which is looking after the girl. In response to an international appeal, it has received more than 5,000 calls since Friday from people looking for their missing children or offering clues. The charity received reports that the girl was forced to beg for money in the streets but its director, Costas Giannopoulos, said she was in good health. "She was frightened and cried herself to sleep. She is not looking for anyone and she is devoted to play," he told Reuters. "It has shaken everyone and has helped bring to light a major problem - just how easy it is to traffic children". Local police chief Vasilis Halastis told Greek TV: "We're always searching for lost children. In this case we're searching for the opposite: the biological, natural parents. This is unprecedented."
Our Czech exchange student hated the Roma with a passion and said it wasn't uncommon for parents to tell their children to be good or else the gypsies might steal them. According to her it wasn't unheard of for gypsy children to be maimed in order for them to be more effective beggars. True or not I have no idea... but at least this kid has been found.
Teach your children to be aware of their surroundings, to know a threat, and how to deal with it. @ditch witch had a run in where the rent-a-kid let two people into the house. She knew she was in trouble, but knew enough to lead them to an armed, unknown adult. She screwed up, but she recovered. Teach them how to recover.
I have had the good fortune to be able to travel quite a bit through Europe the last few years and in every major city you find these gypsy beggars. I was in Paris recently and my wife needed to go to the pharmacy, I had the baby stroller and with the narrow aisle in the store I decided to wait outside. There was this old woman at the corner of the building, crooked back hunched over a cane, her gnarled hand outstretched to anyone passing by. Her fingers were so gnarled that when someone drooped a coin in her palm she couldn't close them. She would let the coin slide off into a little bag at her waist. One of the employees came out and seen her and went back in and apparently called the police. Two policemen showed up and obviously told her to move along. She straightened up, and with perfectly nimble fingers picked up her belongings and made off down the street at a brisk walk. Then in Venice a couple years ago our tour guide was showing us the city and she warned us not to give any money to the beggars. She said you could go to the train station every evening and watch them come from all over the city, go in the bathrooms and change out of their rags, come out with their clean clothes on and have a van waiting for them in the parking lot to take them back to the mainland for the night. So for them to be involved in child trafficking doesn't surprise me at all. Most of the drug trafficking, pick pocketing, swindling etc that goes on in the major European cities is from the gypsies. They have very deservedly earned their reputation as thieves and cons.
Not a very accurate, or deserved, equation. There are many Black American citizens who are not a credit to their race (or species); and there are just as many White American citizens who similarly win no prizes for being productive citizens, or admirable examples of human beings. The Roma do indeed have a negative reputation throughout Europe and, to a lesser extent, the US. How deserved it is, I can't say. I have encountered them, both in Europe and in the US, but a handful of encounters and a couple of "60 Minutes" documentaries aren't really sufficient information to support the condemnation of an entire population group; for me anyway. I wasn't quick enough to prevent the quote from continuing the slur. Fixed it differently here. Sorry 'bout that. ghrit
If her parents are ever found, I wonder if it would be in her best interest to be reunited with them. I hope it's not going to be a case when the authorities blindly think families belong together and don't question the situation. Not that things like that ever happen, you understand...and the girl does seem to have generated alot of interest which can be good if she ends up being put up for adoption.
Romani people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Quite the collection, both here and in South America.
Greek Gypsies fear stigmatization as child traffickers after couple accused of abducting girl | Fox News Only some of them.....
Wow! It would be classic Barry to throw the doors open and welcome a few hundred thousand.. ..................................................... In this police handout photo taken on Thursday , Oct. 17, 2013, Christos Salis, 39, right, and his companion Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, or Selini Sali — as the woman has two separate sets of identity papers. pose with the little girl only known as "Maria" in the Larisa regional police headquarters, Greece. Police in Greece have released the photographs of a couple alleged abductors of a girl known “Maria” after they were formally taken onto pre-trial custody and an international search for the girl’s parents intensified. Photo: Greek Police, AP
