'Abducted' Belarus girl found in Italy

ROME - Italian police have found a 10-year old Belarus orphan girl kept in hiding for nearly three weeks by an Italian couple who feared she would be abused if she returned to the orphanage in her home country.

The girl disappeared nearly three weeks ago just as she was due to return to the orphanage where the Italian family who host her each year for holidays believes she was sexually abused.

Her case has divided Italy and strained relations between the two countries - with Minsk complaining formally about what it called a "deliberate abduction".

Fearing she would be abused again if she returned home, Alessandro Giusto and Chiara Bornacin sent the girl - known as Maria in Italy to protect her identity and in Belarus as Vika, short for Viktoria - to a secret place on September 8.

Acting in defiance of a Genoa court order for the girl to be sent back, the couple then informed police, saying they would rather go to jail than return her to the orphanage in Belarus.

"We are desperate, I can't even stand on my feet," Giusto, who with his wife wants to adopt the girl, told ANSA news agency after police found Vika in a village in northern Italy with the couple's parents.

The Belarussian ambassador to Italy said Vika would be repatriated as soon as doctors found her fit for travel. Minsk has asked Rome for her "immediate and unconditional return".

The envoy did not clarify whether she would be sent to the same orphanage, which has dismissed the abuse charges as "a fantasy invented by an Italian family which wants to have a child".

The girl has spent the summer with the Giusto-Bornacin family near Genoa for the past four years. She is one of about 60,000 Belarus children who have treatment and holidays abroad under a programme for children suffering long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster 20 years ago.

Vika's summer foster parents began suspecting she was being abused after she tied up her Barbie dolls and made them kiss each other, saying it was a "game" played at the orphanage.

They say psychological tests confirmed their fears that she had been sexually abused, possibly by older children. Earlier this week, they gave police a video in which the girl reportedly says she wants to stay in Italy.

The director of the orphanage in Vileika, north of Minsk, said last week Vika was "a good, happy, healthy child".

Official data shows the number of orphans in Belarus has trebled over the past 10 years to about 30,000, in common with much of the former Soviet Union due to tough living conditions.

The government of Belarus, an ex-Soviet republic with a poor record on human rights has announced a moratorium on sending such children to Italy pending Vika's return.

- REUTERS