Return of abducted girl is US dad's Christmas miracle

“Karina is at home and it's a miracle,” Moises Garcia told reporters Saturday.

Garcia fought passionately — and spent about US$350,000 — to get his daughter back after her mother, Emiko Inoue, took the 5-year-old girl to Japan in February 2008.

The liver transplant doctor learned to speak Japanese so he could communicate with a daughter whose English was slipping away.

He hired lawyers in Japan and flew across the Pacific nine times to press his case and try to see his daughter. He enlisted the help of the U.S. State Department and his native Nicaragua. He became active in an advocacy group — Global Future — run by U.S. parents whose children were taken to Japan.

Garcia won a major victory in 2009 when the Japanese courts — which did not recognize the U.S. court that granted Garcia full custody — determined he should have visitation rights. And he kept fighting when his ex-wife appealed and the case dragged on for years.

In all that time, he only saw his daughter three times. The longest visit was for just under two hours at a hotel restaurant. Another visit lasted 10 short minutes at a school open day.

Karina is the first U.S. child abducted by a Japanese parent who was returned to the United States with the aid of the court system.

Her case remains an anomaly, however, because Karina likely never would have been returned if her mother hadn't flown to Hawaii in April and been arrested on child abduction charges.

Inoue spent months in a Wisconsin jail until she reached a plea deal with prosecutors: her parents would send Karina home to Garcia and Inoue would be given probation instead of a lengthy prison sentence.

“This kind of thing should not happen in this civilized world,” Garcia said.

Japan is the only member of the Group of Eight industrialized powers that is not party to a 1980 convention requiring countries to return wrongfully held children to their countries of usual residence.

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