Doha: A Qatari court has turned down a request from an American couple charged with starving their adopted daughter to death that they be allowed to leave the Gulf country temporarily to see their other children.
Matthew and Grace Huang were jailed by Qatari authorities on murder charges last January following the death of their 8-year-old adopted daughter, Gloria. They were released from detention in November but are banned from leaving Qatar while their trial continues.
Their defence team asked on Wednesday that they be allowed to travel and presented a letter from a doctor treating their two children recommending that they be reunited with their parents in the US.
The request was denied pending a final verdict expected at the next court hearing on March 27.
Matthew and Grace Huang, Americans of Asian origin, were arrested in January 2013 after the death of their adopted daughter Gloria, an eight-year-old girl from Ghana, and accused of causing her death in order to sell her organs.
The couple’s supporters describe them as a loving family and insist the girl died of an eating disorder caused by the “extreme poverty” she suffered at a young age in the west African country.
The couple were released in November pending trial, but on Wednesday the court denied their request to leave the country to join their other two adopted children in the United States, and said a verdict would be announced March 27, according to a judicial source.
The defence said the public prosecutor is pushing for the death penalty, although Qatar has not had any executions for several years.
“We have lost our daughter and our sons have lost their sister. And this court has taken more than a year of our lives,” Matthew Huang said outside the courtroom.
“In the midst of our innocence, we feel we have been kidnapped and we just want to go home.”
The family’s supporters maintain that authorities misunderstood the Huangs’ situation and found it inherently suspicious.
The “Free Grace and Matt” website said police accuse the couple of having adopted the children “in order to harvest their organs, or perhaps to perform medical experiments on them.”
The Huangs moved to Qatar in 2012 so Matthew, an engineer, could work on infrastructure projects related to the 2022 World Cup.
The family’s supporters describe them as a loving family, and say they have collected supporting testimony from people who knew them in Qatar, which authorities have declined to accept.
