August 7, 2009 - The Daily Star - Norway denies kidnapping Moroccan kids

OSLO: Norway denied on Thursday accusations from Moroccan Olympic track champion Khalid Skah that Oslo’s embassy in Rabat kidnapped his children amid a custody battle with his estranged wife.
Skah, winner of the 10,000-meter race at the Barcelona Games in 1992, threatened to take the Norwegian government to an international court over the affair, which has triggered a diplomatic row between Norway and Morocco.

“We do not think we did anything reprehensible,” Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bjoern Jahnsen told AFP.

Norway admits giving refuge to the two children, Selma, who was born in 1993, and Tarik, born in 1996, who have dual Moroccan-Norwegian citizenship, when their mother showed up with them at the Norwegian mission in Rabat.

At their request, the embassy let them leave three days later, officials said.

“They came to our embassy because they feared for their lives. We had good reason to believe them and [Foreign Minister] Jonas Gahr Stoere himself decided that they would be welcome to the [ambassador’s] residence,” Jahnsen said.

“After a few days, their mother and themselves asked to leave and we did not have to ask them questions about what they counted on doing,” he said.

Norway said that it has lost sight of them.

Skah, who charges that his children were kidnapped on the night of July 18-19, said Wednesday he would pursue Norway in international and European courts.

The former Olympian said Tarik and Selma had lived in Rabat since 2006 and that their Norwegian mother, Anne Cecilie Hobscot, left the north African country of her own will in 2007 to live in Norway.

Skah accused the Norwegian ambassador of acting “like a real gang leader when he kidnapped my children” and arranged to have them exit Morocco “in obscure and illegal conditions.”

“I am in anguish,” he said. “My children now are living under the pressure of the Norwegian government.” – AFP