A Roma couple is due to appear in court in Greece, on charges of abducting a four-year-old blonde girl named Maria.
The child was found during a raid on a Roma camp in central Greece last week.
DNA tests showed that the girl is not related to the couple, who insist they were given her legitimately.
Maria is being cared for in Athens by a charity, called The Smile of the Child, which has received more than 8,000 calls after an appeal for information about the girl’s identity.
The Roma couple – a woman aged 40 and a 39-year-old man – are due to appear before judges later on Monday to answer charges of abducting a minor and holding false papers.
The Roma community where the girl was found has rallied around the couple, saying they looked after her well.
The head of the Roma association in Farsala in central Greece says the pair treated her better than their biological children and that she loved them.
The brother of the man claiming to be Maria’s father repeated the defence that she had been given to them lawfully after her birth, says the BBC’s Mark Lowen in Athens.
A lawyer representing the Roma couple, Kostas Katsavos, said they were carrying out a search for the girl’s mother.
He said the couple claim the woman had given Maria to them because she could not look after her own biological daughter.
“Our clients’ claim is that ‘we never abducted this child we just adopted her’ in a way that was not legal, that we can confess,” said Mr Katsavos.
But the couple are suspected by social workers of kidnapping the girl and sending her out to beg, or involving her in a sex ring.
Police initially raided the Roma camp to search for drugs and weapons.
They noticed the lack of resemblance between the blonde-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned little girl and her parents, and found further discrepancies when they investigated the family’s documents.
‘Great hope’
The couple had registered different numbers of children with different regional family registries.
The Greek authorities say the couple were in possession of false papers which suggested the woman had given birth to six children within a 10-month period.
When questioned about how they came to have Maria, the couple gave “constantly changing claims”, Thessalia Province Police Director Vassilis Halatsis said.
Through Interpol, Greece has requested assistance from other European countries.
Police decided to appeal internationally as the girl looked as if she might be from northern or eastern Europe.
The case has also brought a response from two families in the UK with long-missing children.
Ben Needham from Sheffield disappeared aged 21 months while on a family holiday on the Greek island of Kos in 1991. His sister said the discovery of the blonde-haired girl in central Greece gave them “great hope”.
A spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter Madeleine went missing in Portugal in 2007, said the case also gave them hope that she would one day be found alive.
