A Roma couple have been officially charged with abducting a mystery blonde, blue-eyed girl in Greece.
Lawyers for the couple say they've been charged over the alleged abduction of a blonde girl who was found at their camp last week.
The couple deny the charges and say they adopted the girl from her true parents, who did not have the money to care for her.
The pair - named in local papers as Hristos Salis, 39, and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40 - were escorted into the back of a courthouse in Larissa from a police van.
Their friends and family waited at the front of the building, with reporters and TV satellite crews. It is understood that no press are allowed into the court.
The couple's lawyer Matetta Palavra was surrounded by journalists as he went to visit his clients in holding cells at the back of the courthouse.
"You will leave us alone for now, we have a difficult road ahead of us," he told them.
The mystery girl - known as Maria - was discovered living in a Gypsy camp near the Greek town of Farsala on Wednesday after a raid by police looking for drugs and weapons.
British police say there is no link between her case of and that of missing boy Ben Needham, who was 21 months old when he vanished on the Greek island of Kos in 1991.
A prosecutor who accompanied police on the raid thought it odd that Maria did not look like her darker-skinned "parents".
DNA tests later confirmed the couple are not her biological parents. The pair claim they were given the child by a Bulgarian woman who was unable to look after her.
Greek authorities have put out a worldwide appeal to help identify the youngster and find her real family.
Maria is being cared for in Athens by the Greek charity Smile Of The Child, which say they have been inundated with more than 8,000 calls about the girl. The calls have come from people in the US, Scandinavia, Australia, South Africa and other countries.
Charity spokesman Panayiotis Pardalis said a few of the calls had specific details and have been forwarded to police.
'Family raised the child as if it was their own'
Neighbours in Farsala's ramshackle gipsy camp said Maria's real father had come to look for her soon after she was taken away by police.
Babis Dimitriou, the chairman of the local Roma community, told The Daily Telegraph "There was a Bulgarian husband and wife who were working around Greece in temporary jobs, who used to stay here sometimes. At one point they left the girl to be raised by the family here in the village".
"The family raised the child as if it was their own, although her father would come back every now and then to see her. The last time he visited was only five days ago, after the arrests had been made. All the other Roma here were telling the Bulgarian man to explain to the police that the girl was his, but he has now disappeared".
His account was backed by other residents, the paper reported.
The Roma community in Farsala is said to be anxious about the world-wide media attention the case is attracting. In a country already devastated by economic crisis, the Roma in the camp make a living selling fruit, carpets, blankets, baskets and shoes at local markets.
They are already considered by some to be social outcasts, thieves and beggars, and now they are worried they will be wrongfully stigmatised as kidnappers and child traffickers.
