Qatar court acquits US couple over daughter’s death
Chinese-American couple, jailed amid claims they had starved to death their adopted black daughter to sell her organs, are free to leave Qatar
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 30 November, 2014, 6:13pm
UPDATED : Monday, 01 December, 2014, 4:31am
Agence France-Presse in Doha
The Huangs, with now-deceased Gloria, and an adopted son.
A Qatari appeals court acquitted a Chinese-American couple who had been accused of starving their adopted daughter to death - but hours after the verdict they were barred from leaving the country even though the court had ruled that they were free to do so.
Los Angeles couple Matthew and Grace Huang were arrested in January 2013 after the death of their eight-year-old daughter Gloria, who had been adopted from an orphanage in Ghana.
The couple, of Asian descent, were initially accused of starving Gloria to death to sell her organs but were jailed for three years for parental neglect in March.
Yesterday the appeals court ruled the couple were not guilty and said they were free to leave Qatar, based on witness accounts that Gloria was "not neglected in leading a normal life".
But a spokesman for the family said that Qatari immigration officials had then barred them from leaving and confiscated their passports.
"Grace and I want to go home and be reunited with our sons," said Matthew Huang straight after the verdict, describing the judicial process in the Gulf state as "long and emotional".
"We have been unable to grieve our daughter's death but we want to thank the judge for today's decision," he told reporters outside the court.
"We're looking forward to returning to the US."
Witnesses had testified that they saw Gloria eating one day before her death, the presiding judge said.
US couple Matthew and Grace Huang who were charged with parental neglect that led to the death of their adopted daughter are acquitted by a Qatari appeals court. Photo: AFP
"This negates the charge that she was prevented from eating, a charge that the court of first instance used as a base for its initial ruling," the judge said.
A forensic pathologist told the court last month that Gloria's corpse showed signs that she had not eaten for days.
"I found no signs of food in her stomach and the whole intestine, and I found no other reasons for death," said the expert, Anees Mahmud.
But the Huangs have insisted that Gloria died of an eating disorder rooted in a troubled early childhood.
The couple were released in November last year pending trial, but the court turned down their request to leave the Gulf state to join their other two adopted Africa-born children in the United States.
Both adoption and multiracial families are rare in Qatar, a conservative Arab emirate, and the family's supporters had maintained that Qatari authorities misunderstood the Huangs' situation.
A report by Qatari police had earlier raised questions about why the Huangs would adopt children who did not share their "hereditary traits".
The public prosecutor had pushed for the death penalty for the Huangs.
Supporters of the Huangs had launched a campaign on social media and created a website to put pressure on the Qatari authorities to free them.
The "Free Matt and Grace" website says the daughter died "suddenly" on January 15.
It says she had suffered from eating disorders "triggered by the extreme poverty she endured at an early age".
In addition to imprisonment, the lower court had fined the couple 15,000 riyals (HK$32,000) each and ordered them to be deported after their sentence.
Matthew Huang last month criticised the court as a "sham", insisting that the couple felt "kidnapped and trapped".
The Huangs moved to Qatar in 2012 for Matthew, an engineer, to work on infrastructure projects linked to the 2022 World Cup.
Qatar hosts an important American military air operations centre at an air base outside the capital, Doha, that is being used as part of air strikes against the Islamic State group.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
