A family from Mutomo village in Gatundu South district has asked the government to help bring back their daughter and her son from Italy.
The family is involved in a legal tussle with Italian authorities over the adoption of their daughter’s son without the legal consent of his mother. Thirty-year-old Teresia Mukuhi went to Italy in 2006 where she worked as a messenger in a post office in Rome. She gave birth to a baby boy on March 24, 2009.
Mukuhi fell sick thereafter and her family organised for her younger sister, Hannah Wairimu, to travel to Italy to take care of her. On April 9, 2010 the Minors Law Court of Rome, under presiding judge Isabella Foschini, ordered that the powers of the mother be suspended due to her ill health.
She ordered the boy, Daniel Karungu Mukuhi, be placed in a children’s home with specific orders that he does not leave the premises. This was despite one of Mukuhi’s brothers, Joseph Karungu, offering to host the two and become an adoptive father to Daniel. Karungu travelled to Italy in November the same year to present himself before the court as a proposed guardian to his nephew.
But his sister later told him that the court on March 4, 2011 ruled that Daniel be adopted by an Italian family. Mukuhi, who has since recovered, says she will not leave Italy without her son.
– the-star.co.ke
