A Los Angeles married couple has been thrown into jail in Qatar. They are accused of starving their daughter to death and of murdering her. Coalition groups from the U.S. are analyzing the situation and attempting to draw publicity to what they call the “unjust arrests,” according to FindLaw.com.
Mathew and Grace Huang were arrested in Doha, Qatar after their daughter died. The couple adopted the girl child from Ghana when she was four. They have two other children adopted from Africa, and have been banned from leaving the country. The children’s grandmother is currently caring for them as their parents are jailed.
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The Huangs were in the Middle East so that Mathew could work as an engineer on two major infrastructure projects. Their daughter had been severely malnourished in her early childhood and had taken to the odd habit of refusing food from her family to binge eat on food she might find in garbage cans or off the street. Pediatric forensic pathologist Janice Ophoven prepared a report that detailed that “such behavior is not uncommon in adopted children who have suffered from severe malnutrition in their past.”
The child was anorexic and refused to have eaten for four days, and she had died of dehydration and wasting disease. The Qatari police felt that the Huangs were suspect because they adopted children that didn’t share their “hereditary traits” and that perhaps the Huangs bought the children to traffic them or harvest their organs. Efforts are currently being made to help free the Huangs by different groups such as the California Innocence Project and the David House Agency.
