Verdict looms for US couple in Qatar

Doha: Matthew and Grace Huang spend five hours a day on Skype home schooling their two adopted sons, now living with Grace Huang’s mother back home in the US. The Huangs are also using the Internet to connect with a US counsellor, who is helping them attempt to repair their psychs after nearly a year of separate incarcerations in Qatar’s penal system.

Mostly they just wait in a rented apartment in Qatar for the verdict, scheduled for Thursday, in a murder trial in which they are accused in the death of their adopted daughter by depriving her of food and water for four days.

The Huangs have asserted that they are innocent, victims of a gross miscarriage of justice. The daughter, Gloria, who was 8, had an eating disorder, a legacy of her impoverished childhood in Ghana, in which she would sometimes fast, binge-eat or steal food. Friends said that she and the boys, who were also adopted from Africa, had seemed healthy and happy.

The precise cause of the child’s death has never been established. But the case has revealed what the Huangs and their lawyers and supporters have called deeply ingrained prejudices about adoption and multiracial families, based on the presumption that the girl must have been abused.

“This whole country is very confusing to me,” said Matthew Huang, 37, an engineer from Los Angeles who had been helping build Doha’s water and sewer systems, as he sat with his wife for an interview on Sunday, the first since their daughter’s death.

“I feel that a lot of our situation has been caused by ethnic misunderstanding, by religious misunderstanding.”

Grace Huang, 36, described it as a Kafkaesque journey in which neither of them could fully understand what was happening.

“The hardest part was being suddenly separated from my family, not seeing the kids, just at the time when I needed them the most,” she said.

The Huang case began in January 2013 with their arrest after the couple rushed Gloria, unconscious, to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Their two boys, now 8 and 12, were temporarily placed in an orphanage.

The news quickly spread among their circle of friends, mostly Christians like the Huangs, members of a small expatriate congregation, the Grace Fellowship Church. Angela Verrips, a neighbour who testified on their behalf, said nobody could believe it. “This was a huge shock,” she said. “Our friends in prison — bizarre.”

The case has attracted widespread attention among Qatar’s broader expatriate population and is regarded by some as a test of the country’s commitment to open-mindedness and the judiciary’s ability to consider all the facts. It has also been a constant issue for the embassy of the US government, which considers Qatar an important ally.

Qatar is home to the US’ largest military airbase in the Middle East. Dozens of US corporations and organisations have established themselves in Doha.

Prosecutors initially based part of their case on the suggestion that the Huangs may have been child traffickers, questioning in court how people of Asian descent could possibly want African children as their own.

The judge in the case, Abdullah Al Emady, who has a reputation for independence and fairness, appeared to sense the possibility that a grievous oversight may have been committed, eventually giving custody of the two other children to Grace Huang’s mother, who lives in Washington state. The judge also released the defendants on their own recognisance in November.

Still, there is no assurance that they will be acquitted, and under Qatari law they could receive the death penalty if convicted, although long prison sentences would be more likely.

They were not permitted to leave the country pending the verdict in the trial, which has proceeded extremely slowly.

In his final argument, on February 5, the lead prosecutor, Ashoor Farah, cited unidentified witnesses who had asserted that the Huangs had locked Gloria in her room, something the defence has disputed.

He also invoked an Islamic prohibition on adoption, according to an English translation of his remarks: “Allah has banned it as it leads to assembling of foreigners with each other, which leads to extremely bad outcomes.”

A serious allegation was made last month by the defence team, which includes the California Innocence Project, a San Diego-based group that helps defendants it considers wrongly accused, and the David House Agency, a group in Los Angeles that assists Americans ensnared in legal crises abroad. They said prosecutors had presented a fabricated pathology report, and asked Qatar’s attorney general to investigate.

Telephone and email requests for comment from the attorney general’s office were not returned.

In their interview, the Huangs said they had initially been seduced by what they called Qatar’s veneer of multiculturalism when they agreed to come here a few years ago.

“People were curious but in a friendly way,” Grace Huang said. “I could see them trying to figure us out.”

They spoke nervously about their time in prison, where Grace Huang found herself in the midst of about 50 other women, suspected in a range of nonviolent crimes, and almost all of them poorly educated Asian expatriates with limited English. They had found work here as maids or in other service jobs. One, she said, had been raped and was then accused of extramarital sex.

They were all curious about Grace Huang’s family, she said. “Mostly I think we were very confusing to people because we looked Chinese and yet we are American,” she said. “It took a lot of explaining.”

The only time she saw her husband while they were incarcerated, she said, was in the court hearings that constituted most of their trial. They could not sit together, and she was required to wear a head cover and robe. But she was permitted to keep a Bible in prison.

Matthew Huang said he was confined with up to 150 prisoners, charged with crimes ranging from adultery and drunkenness to assault and murder. His asthma was aggravated by all the cigarette smoke, he said, and fights would often break out over who could use the remote control for the single television set.

He said he was often afraid but was also struck by the number of nationalities, mostly Asians and Africans among the prison population.

“I actually met people from 57 countries inside,” he said. “I kept a list, just because it was so global.”

The Huangs appeared fraught during the interview, not holding hands or exhibiting other signs of affection. They said they rarely go outside and had to sell their Los Angeles home to pay their legal bills and other expenses.

Grace Huang called Internet telephony “a wonderful invention” that had enabled them to maintain a semblance of relations with their sons. “We Skype pretty much any time that they are awake and we’re awake,” she said.

Daniel Chin, a brother of Grace Huang who was flying from Los Angeles to Doha as the verdict approached, said in a telephone interview that the family was hopeful for an acquittal.

“What’s the alternative?” he said. “The only alternative is to be in despair. All of us have crept up to the cliff and looked over.”