Dutch diplomat accused of abandoning adopted child says she suffers rare disease

Raymond Poeteray – a Dutch diplomat widely criticized for having "returned" his South Korean-born daughter seven years after adopting her as an infant in the Asian press – said that his daughter was "very sick," and suffers from a "severe form of fear of emotional attachment," the AP said.  

"In contrast to what has been written, we don't want to be rid of our daughter and there's no suggestion we would disown her, right up until today. We are (her) parents and we feel responsible for her well-being and we always will."

Those were doctors who advised to hand her over to social services in Hong Kong. "Although the specialists think now that (she) may not be returned to us, we continue to hope," he wrote.

The Netherlands , Hong Kong and South Korea were outraged when the South Korean consulate the family had abandoned the girl because of her bad cultural adaptation – a very strange fact on conditions that she was adopted when being just 4 months old.

The couple was said to have adopted the girl because of confidence in infertility – but later they have conceived their own son.

However, the couple also has an older son of their own.

The family firmly denied that they had treated the girl any differently than their own children, but had difficulty in communicating with her from the start.

"We tried intensive family therapy to find a cure. To our great disappointment, things didn't get better, they got worse and the rest of the family began to suffer immensely from that," he wrote in a letter signed by him and his wife, Meta.

"In mid-2006, on the advice of known medical specialists, professionals from the adoption organization 'Mother's Choice' and the social services of Hong Kong, it was decided that in (her) interest she should be placed in a separate house and we would not be allowed to have any contact with her. The therapy for our family and our daughter continues to this day."

The girls speaks Dutch but haven’t been naturalized as a Dutch citizen - an oversight amid larger medical concerns over the girl.

An official at the South Korean consulate in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that the child also speaks English and Chinese - without specifying which Chinese language.

"We will do our very best to find a solution by which (she) too can find happiness in her life," Poeteray wrote.

In conclusion, media was asked to leave the family alone.

"This is indeed a private matter, for which we as parents bear the responsibility. ... the publicity itself is already painful enough, but what's worse is, it doesn't help us find a solution for our problems."

On Thursday the couple was expected to arrive to Netherlands to discuss the incident with the Dutch Foreign Ministry.