Americans Jailed for Months in Qatar After Daughter’s Death

Matthew and Grace Huang, an American couple with three adopted children from Africa, lived as a family in the affluent Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar starting in July 2012.

For most of the time since then, the parents have been imprisoned there, accused of starving their 8-year-old daughter to death with the intent of selling her organs.

The Qatari authorities have repeatedly denied the Huangs’ application for bail, and only in the last few weeks have they permitted Mrs. Huang’s mother to take the surviving children, two boys, home to the United States.

Throughout the four pretrial hearings, lawyers for the defendants, who have asserted their innocence, have not been permitted to present their side of the story to the presiding judge.

On Wednesday, they are scheduled to get that opportunity.

There is no dispute that their daughter, Gloria, died on Jan. 15 after she had not eaten, perhaps for days.

But the Huangs and their supporters have asserted that she had an underlying eating disorder that the prosecution has ignored.

They have described the case as an egregious combination of flawed or nonexistent evidence, ethnic prejudice and extreme cultural misunderstandings in a host country where multiracial families are an anomaly and adoption is an alien concept.

The Qatar police investigators, in their report of Gloria’s death, found the family’s circumstances highly suspicious, and wrote that the girl had been emaciated.

The defendants, they concluded in an investigation, “participated with others in child trafficking, most likely to either sell their organs or to conduct medical experiments on them.”

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