Couple acquitted in Qatar head to U.S.
Matthew and Grace Huang, the American couple in Qatar exonerated in the death of their adopted African daughter after a nearly two-year prosecution collapsed on appeal, headed home Wednesday to Los Angeles.
The Huangs boarded an afternoon flight from Doha airport, a departure attended by the U.S. ambassador, Dana Shell Smith, who announced on her Twitter account they had left.
“Matt and Grace Huang are wheels up from Qatar,” she wrote. “Emotional.”
On Tuesday, Qatari and U.S. officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, offered assurances that all bureaucratic entanglements that had blocked the couple’s departure for three days had been resolved.
Kerry issued a statement that the Qatar attorney general, Ali bin Fetais al-Marri, had informed the U.S. Embassy that he would file no further appeal in the case and that as of Wednesday, a travel ban on the couple was lifted.
The Huangs had been pressing for permission to leave Qatar after an appellate court ruled Sunday that they were innocent of any wrongdoing in the death of their 8-year-old daughter, Gloria, in January 2013.
Although the court had said they were free to go, they were blocked from boarding a flight out of Doha, the capital, hours after the acquittal, raising suspicions that Qatari officials had imposed new obstacles and possibly new charges. But a State Department spokesman, Jen Psaki, said unforeseen paperwork was required to rescind the travel ban, which lawyers for the Huangs submitted Monday.
Their case attracted widespread attention in Qatar and beyond, partly because of the flimsiness of the evidence, the racial prejudices that appeared to underlie the prosecution, and the slow progress of the case, which became an irritant in relations with the United States.
The Huangs, who had adopted three children from Africa, moved to Qatar in July 2012 because Matthew Huang was working as an engineer on a public-works project.
They were arrested after rushing Gloria, comatose, to a Doha hospital after she had not eaten for days, a symptom of an eating disorder she had acquired during her impoverished childhood in Ghana. Prosecutors suspected that the Huangs were child traffickers who had sought to kill Gloria by denying her food.
Initially charged with murder, the Huangs were convicted of child endangerment in March.
The appellate judge threw out the case based on evidence that the Huangs were good parents, that Gloria and her siblings had been happy children and that a forensics report cited by the prosecution appeared to have been fabricated.
The Huangs have not seen their other children, both boys, since their arrest. They said they have been communicating daily by Skype with the boys, who were initially placed in a Qatar orphanage but later permitted to go back to the United States in the custody of their adopted grandmother.