Did the parents come forward to claim the little girl? I haven't followed the story closely and missed how they matched the DNA,and so fast, too!

Greece and Bulgaria are investigating whether there was baby-selling involved.

Some alleged that this woman went around trying to sell her child, and other reporting says now that she used to work for the couple that adopted the little girl.

It appears that the girl likely has albinism, the reason for the reported eye problems. Some reporting is saying the couple in Bulgaria learned about "Maria" being in custody by news reports, but other reporting said that the Bulgarian father of the child had been seen in the area shortly after the raid. Either way, the family has albinism as a pronounced genetic trait, and that's a very good reason to go forward with DNA testing on a potential match. I suspect had that not panned out, eventually they would have looked at mitochondrial DNA to try to see if she was likely from the European Romani population or another ethnic group.

Here's some video of the mother in Bulgaria speaking, and the brothers and sisters.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/lightbox/world/videos/9326794/Suspected-mother-in-Greek-Maria-case?KeepThis=true

for the link

is so much better than kidnapping a kid and training it to beg.

Says a lot that you did not say there are bad people in every group. Go figure.

I notice you didn't say that not all women are as racist as I am so you must be sexist.

You're throwing around the racism label left and right at people who are criticising individuals in this specific case. When white people kidnapped Elizabeth Smart that was bad too. Ariel Castro? Bad. Chinese crime syndicates that kidnap babies, mutilate them and send them begging on subways. Also very bad.

Satistfied? Can we go back to talking about what we're actually talking about (a Bulgarian couple that sold their kid door to door). Criticism of that couple or the couple that bought the kid and then used her to make money by begging on the street does not equal saying "all Roma people are evil". To me this is such a painfully obvious point that it didn't need to be said but apparently I'm wrong there.

Does every news story that involves a black perpetrators need to be qualified with "but not all black people are like this"? Doesn't constantly bringing up the perpetrators race and making the point that not all members of that group are like them begin to venture into its own kind of racism?

As a whole, there have been statements made about eradicating the culture, all rom are dodgy, all rom are theives and scam merchants. People seem to be missing that there are real reasons for the distrust of authorities and outsiders, a real fear of the darkening returning. There is a context to not trusting especially the greek authorities especially when you consider there are still anti roma laws on the books.

is herself Roma and not as first reports stated Nordic, will the concern for welfare evaporate?

So if you have numerous offspring there, you shouldn't be expecting Bulgaria will support them in style.

so the racists lose one, in that she is a Roma herself after all.

The girl was found during a raid on other criminal activity. The DNA of the "parents" did not match the DNA of the girl and they kept changing their story about her. They had fraudulent paperwork. Her hair appears to have been dyed. There is still no proof that child trafficking was not at play here. There is still a question as to whether the girl was being well taken care of.

To insist that the couple is simply a victim of racism is disingenuous. They are victims of their own decisions to repeatedly lie and to act outside the law. I am well aware of the history of Roma persecution. This situation is about more than that.

Because the girl was blonde and blue eyed.

Yes, a large part of it was that the child looked nothing like the "parents," and I'm sure her coloring was part of that. The suspicion that she was not biologically related turned out to be correct. And, although I don't doubt Roma can have fair coloring or that dark parents can have fair children, this girl, I understand, has albinoism, so she is not, in fact, a Roma with naturally fair coloring. So not really a great example. And the parents were already being investigated for other criminal activity. The police didn't just see a random blonde Roma girl and snatch her away.

The Roma parents in Ireland have much higher ground to stand on than this couple, but even there I am ambivalent about whether police went too far. I prefer to give authorities a fair bit of leeway when it comes to possible child abduction or trafficking. I can't help but think about Jaycee Dugard and some other abductees who could have been rescued much earlier if some in authority had been a little more inquisitive and proactive.

Neighbors are vital in being able to find missing kids. But even if they'd taken poor Jaycee out in public, her abductor didn't look that much like a different ethnicity.

The only thing that gets these kids found by their neighbors is *getting their pictures out there*. Far and wide. I support the drive to have web 404 pages show random missing children, preferably from the local area. It could easily be done, and the EU is doing it already.

People just assume every rom is dark. There is diversity as its a very large community.

But that she appeared Nordic. That seemed to be the basis for suspicion at first.

Albinism causes a more pronounced pigment lack than my ginger-vitis, but it isn't beyond the pale (pardon the pun). I suspected albinism might be a possibility when they mentioned that she had eye problems -- in many Indo-European ethnic groups, albinism can be hard to distinguish from being very pale unless there are other features, like those vision difficulties. The guy I dated with it didn't look all that different from his brother without the condition.

It does go to show just how much we judge based on color alone, though, in how many people looked at her features and saw other ethnicities. It's one reason why in most cases, facial reconstructions are best rendered in greyscale for print -- people have a tendency to look at a picture and see color before they see facial shape and structure, which is far more important for matching missing persons.

Could be a much tougher call.

I've seen African Americans with it. Then remember Johnny Winter the rock star.

Astigmatism, nystagmus, extreme photosensitivty, they're all very common. If they noticed problems with her eyes before school-age, it signals that she may have had episodes of nystagmus.

They confirmed her real birth certificate in Greece, and she really was born in 2009. That goes to another limitation in forensic technologies to try to give names to the missing -- dental record ages are not always accurate, and there's always a margin of error even on the best estimate. Just like for height, weight, etc, on skeletal remains cases. It's far easier when you have pictures, but I can point out two unsolved cases right now where we have extensive photographs of the living victims and no family members have come to claim them -- in one case, she was abducted when she was about Maria's age.

But in everyday life, the genes go unnoticed most often in the fair Caucasian population. The guy I saw had fun using Kool-Aid dye on his hair, and usually made it look more blonde than it was naturally. He didn't look to have "red" or "purple" eyes like some people theorize they would have. So we really don't realize how common the gene is.