Children living in Dutch embassy returned to mother

TWO children who lived in the Dutch embassy in Damascus for nearly six months during a custody battle between their parents were reunited with their mother yesterday.

Dutch courts had awarded custody to the mother, Janneke Schoonhoven, but the children travelled to Syria with their father, Hisham al-Hafez, during a vacation in 2004 and never came back. Schoonhoven filed kidnapping charges against al-Hafez.

According to Schoonhoven, the pair — Ammar, 13, and Sara, 11 — slipped away from their father and took a cab to the embassy in June 2006, hoping to be able to return to the Netherlands.