The Blond Angel case started with the search for the biological parents of a blond girl found by Greek police in a Romani camp on 16 October 2013. Eight days later, after the case was internationalised with the involvement of Interpol, and an appeal for witnesses launched by the child protection association and children's charity The Smile of the Child, the investigation led to the identification of the child's parents, Atanas and Sacha Roussev, in a Romani camp in Bulgaria. Both confirmed that they had entrusted their daughter shortly after her birth to Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, the couple with whom she had been found. On 9 November 2015, they were acquitted of the kidnapping charge due to lack of evidence. The child, Maria Roussev, remained in Greece, in the care of the association.
The case was the subject of ten days of intense media coverage around the world, especially in Europe, before disappearing from the news once the biological parents had been found. It also led to a series of reforms within the Greek administration, highlighting the shortcomings of the civil registry as one of the factors in the child's situation. The media coverage led to the emergence of several similar cases across the continent, most notably in Ireland, where two other "blond angels" were taken from their Romani parents by the authorities. Official and associative reactions followed, most notably from the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, who denounced the risks of stigmatisation associated with the spread of prejudices based on stereotypes.
Course of events
In Greece On 16 October 2013,(fr) . at a Romani camp near Farsala in central Greece,(fr) . police officers conducting a routine search for drugs and weapons were struck by the appearance of a four-to six-year-old girl, with blond hair, pale skin and green eyes, which set her apart from the four other children she was playing with and the dark-skinned brunette(fr) . couple staying nearby. Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, then aged 39 and 40 respectively, claimed to be Maria's adoptive parents, but neither could provide any proof. The police removed the girl from the camp(fr) . and entrusted her to the care of The Smile of the Child, a children's charity based in Athens.
DNA tests confirmed that the Romani couple were not the child's biological parents. When questioned, they successively gave several explanations: according to one, she had been entrusted to them in Crete by her father, a Canadian national; according to another, they had found her at the entrance to a supermarket; finally, they declared that they had been given custody of her by her mother, a Bulgarian Romani woman who was unable to bring the child up, shortly after her birth.(fr) Vincent Vantighem (22 Octobre 2013 et 29 Janvier 2014). "Tout comprendre sur l'affaire de « l'Ange blond »". 20 minutes.fr. Suspected of having kidnapped or bought the child to take advantage of welfare benefits and, ultimately, a forced marriage, they were charged on 21 October with kidnapping, as well as with forging documents for the declaration of birth made in 2009 at Athens Town Hall. The couple were remanded in custody pending trial.
Internationalisation
By turning to Interpol, the Greek authorities decided to internationalise the case. The police director for the Larissa region, Vassilis Halatsis, told the press: "We are getting information from all over Europe which shows that this problem, of children going missing and falling into gypsy hands, is a problem throughout the continent". To determine whether the girl had been abducted or trafficked,. Interpol first compared her genetic profile with those registered in its worldwide database. Failing a match, it asked its 190 member countries to carry out the same check in their national databases.. Maria was not found on any of the lists of wanted children.(fr)
For its part, The Smile of the Child launched an appeal for witnesses, which received between 8,000 and 9,000 replies. Eight cases of missing children from several countries, including the United States, Sweden, Poland and France, were extracted and examined in depth. These included the case of Lisa Irwin, who was reported missing in 2011 at the age of 11 months from Kansas, and that of Greek parents, one of them of Scandinavian origin, who lost a daughter at birth in 2009, whose body was never returned to them, and who, after obtaining an exhumation, found her coffin empty.
In Bulgaria The last version given by the suspects enabled the search to be traced back to a Romani camp in Nikolaevo, Bulgaria. Many of the camp's inhabitants had the same physical characteristics as the girl. According to a neighbour, a woman named Sacha Roussev was moved when she saw a photo of the child on television. When questioned on 24 October 2013, she photographed the couple to whom she had entrusted her daughter in 2009. DNA tests confirmed that she and her husband Atanas Roussev were Maria's biological parents. A check at Lamía hospital revealed the birth certificate, dated 31 January 2009.
The Bulgarian courts opened an investigation into child abandonment. The authorities planned to remove seven of the Roussevs' children from their care and place them in various foster homes.Jana Hainsworth (13–14 Novembre 2013). "'Blonde angel' case: Don't demonise 'bad' parents, look at the system". EurActiv.com. The testimony of Anton Kolev, a cousin, sheds light on their behaviour at the time of their daughter's birth: they were in Greece picking peppers at the time, in an illegal situation and without the necessary means to obtain papers to bring her back to Bulgaria with them.(fr) Dejoie and Harissou 2014, p. 20. They claimed to have received no financial compensation, citing the precariousness of their living conditions since then; according to a relative, they nevertheless received the 300 euros needed for their own return to Bulgaria. The couple explained that they were not in a position to take care of the child at the time, but that they now wish to resume responsibility for her.
At the same time, Maria Roussev, under the care of The Smile of the Child, spent several days in hospital, where she underwent a series of medical tests. There was then talk of her being taken in by a Bulgarian welfare centre for a few weeks or months, before being placed with a Bulgarian foster family.
Judicial outcome On 30 June 2014, the Larissa court decided to leave Maria in the care of The Smile of the Child. Its president, Kostas Giannopoulos, pointed out that he had not made any such request, nor had the biological parents, the only complaint having been made by the Bulgarian child protection agency.(fr) AFP/NXP (02.06.2014). "L'«ange blond» sera confié à une association". TDG.ch. Although she used to only speak Romani,Le Bas 2015, p. 28. according to the charity, Maria has now learned to speak both Greek and Romani fluently. Meanwhile, the two defendants have been released, pending trial.
On 9 November 2015, the Larissa Court of Appeal acquitted Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou of the kidnapping charge, for lack of evidence. For falsifying documents, they were sentenced to 18 months and two years imprisonment respectively, suspended. At the same time, Maria Roussev was still being cared for in Greece by The Smile of the Child, and had started school. According to the psychologists looking after her, she is gradually recovering from the trauma she has suffered.
Repercussions
For the Greek administration
The arrest of the suspect couple brought to light the flaws in the birth registration system,(fr) Gilles Trequesser, Renée Maltezou and Clémence Apetogbor (source Reuters) (23 October 2013). "L'affaire de « l'ange blond » révèle les failles de l'État grec". Capital.fr. identified as one of the causes of the case. At the time, the centralized register had only been in existence for five months. Eleftheria Dimopoulou had registered six children in Larissa since 1993, and another four under a different identity in Trikala, also in Thessaly. Christos Salis, for his part, had registered four children in Farsala. Of the 14 children declared by the couple (ten of whom are nowhere to be found), six were allegedly born in less than ten months. Maria was registered beyond the legal deadline of one hundred days after birth, and her adoptive mother used a false identity for one of the two testimonies required. In total, the couple received 2,790 euros per month in child benefit.
The prosecutor in charge of the case emphasised that the case was not necessarily unique, and that a similar case could have happened elsewhere in the country. The mayor of Athens launched an audit of the local civil registry; several of the employees in charge of births were suspended and their director dismissed. At national level, the Court of Cassation ordered an investigation into all birth certificates issued since 2008, with the exception of those declared by hospitals. Following this measure, several cases of birth declarations considered suspicious by the authorities were examined by the courts.(fr)
For the media The case was immediately covered by the media on an unusual scale. In Greece, the discovery and physical characteristics of Maria fuelled intense media activity.(fr) The country's media widely circulated photos of the child, whom they dubbed the "Blond Angel". The nickname was picked up by the world's press when, three days later, the story was reported by news agencies (AFP, AP and Reuters in particular); by 19 October 2013, the child's face was visible in much of the world's media, both in Europe and internationally. In addition to the responses to its appeal for witnesses, The Smile of the Child recorded 200,000 visits to its website, and half a million to its Facebook page.
The media frenzy lasted for ten days. Much of the European press endorsed the police theory of kidnapping, and took up the theme of Romani child kidnappers. In British newspapers, particularly the tabloids, the stolen child theory was linked to the cases of missing children that were regularly followed up on. Interest in Maria was fuelled in particular by the high-profile disappearance of two young, blond British children who went missing while on holiday abroad: Ben Needham, who went missing during a family holiday on the Greek island of Kos on 24 July 1991 and Madeleine McCann, who disappeared from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal on 3 May 2007. In the case of the latter, the Portuguese police were about to reopen the case that had been closed five years previously.
In addition to mass reproduction of agency dispatches, the media, and in particular, the written press, both in Europe and elsewhere, often added their own editorial content. Some newspapers, such as The Sun, described the living conditions in the Romani camps. The portrait of Maria varied. While initially, she was most often described as a blond with green, sometimes grey-green eyes, articles soon declared her eyes to be blue. Others added to her story, mentioning that the girl had been raised "to be given in marriage at her twelfth birthday", or abducted "to be sold"; she had been forced to beg in the streets or dance in front of camp families; a poor-quality video, in which a blonde girl does a few dance steps with a couple of adults, was supposed to show "Maria, shimmying with a pale complexion, her eyes haggard".
Some newspapers emphasised the clichés to which the Roma are subjected, and denounced a racial or racist dimension in both the police and media handling of the case. The Guardian criticised media hype and stereotyping, while French publications Le Monde and Libération, after relaying the initial dispatches, set out to deconstruct the prejudices underlying the "Blond Angel" theme and the "stolen child" thesis.