Grace with the children- during happier times. PICTURE: freemattandgrace.com RIGHT: Matthew (centre) and Grace Huang speak to journalists outside the entrance of the Court of First Instance in Doha yesterday.


Agencies/Doha

A Qatari court yesterday sentenced a US couple from Los Angeles to three years in prison for starving their adopted eight-year-old daughter to death.
Matthew and Grace Huang were arrested in January 2013 after their daughter Gloria, who was adopted from an orphanage in Ghana, died in Doha. They were accused of causing her death in order to sell her organs.
The court also ordered the couple to pay a fine of QR15,000 each and to be deported after serving their sentence.
Reading the verdict, the judge did not specify the exact charges for which the Huangs were convicted, but the defence lawyer was expected to get a full briefing on the verdict within days, a legal source said.
The couple claimed the child had an eating disorder and appealed to US President Barack Obama, who visits  Saudi Arabia today, to intervene in the case.
They have two weeks to appeal.
“We have just been wrongfully convicted and we feel as if we are being kidnapped by the Qatar judicial system,” Matthew Huang said in a statement read to reporters outside the court.
“This verdict is wrong and appears to be nothing more than an effort to save face,” he said.
Huang said the ruling must be “overturned immediately and we should be allowed to go home.”
Defence lawyer Eric Volz said the case was left in confusion and the charge unclear.
“As far as we know they’ve not been ordered to go back to prison but we also were not told that they are not going back to prison,” said Volz.
The lawyer said the couple “came to the court thinking that they would be declared innocent. Matt and Grace even had plane tickets already paid for. They thought they were gonna go home and be with their sons.”
The couple of Asian origin were released in November pending trial, but the court had denied their request to leave the country to join their other two adopted children in the United States.
The public prosecutor had pushed for the death penalty for the Huangs.
The family’s supporters maintain Qatari authorities misunderstood the Huangs’ situation and found it suspicious.
The “Free Matt and Grace” website said police accused the couple of having adopted the children “in order to harvest their organs, or perhaps to perform medical experiments on them.”
Gloria had “an eating disorder, a legacy of her impoverished childhood in Ghana, in which she would sometimes fast, binge-eat or steal food,” the website says.
The Huangs moved to Qatar in 2012 after Matthew, an engineer, joined a company which had bagged a contract for an  infrastructure project.
Their supporters describe them as a loving family and say they have collected supporting testimony from people who knew them in Qatar, which authorities declined to accept.
An autopsy found that the girl had died of “forced starvation” and malnutrition, but the couple argued that she had been suffering from malnutrition-related diseases since they adopted her from Ghana at the age of 4.
The US State Department said on Wednesday that Washington was concerned by “indications that not all of the evidence was being weighed by the court and that cultural misunderstandings may have been leading to an unfair trial”.
The judge reading the verdict did not specify what offence the couple had been convicted of, but the prosecution had earlier downgraded an original charge of premeditated murder to one of “murder by negligence”.
David House, an international crisis agency working with the family, said the defence lawyer was expected to get a full briefing on the verdict within days.
Gloria died on January 15, 2013 and Qatari police charged the couple the next day.
The pair spent nearly a year in prison before being released on their own recognizance, but were not allowed to leave Qatar.