The Greek family of a young girl now called Maria are insisting that the girl should be returned to them, even though tests have show she belongs to a Bulgarian Roma family.

"We want Maria to come home. We have been saying this from the beginning, we and the lawyers, that Maria was given to us by a Bulgarian, and it's unfair for her to grow up in a charity, since she has a family," said Marinos, who is married to one of the Roma couple's daughters and therefore calls himself Maria's brother-in-law.

A lawyer for the Greek Roma couple said yesterday a legal team would fight to get Maria back to the couple.

Maria was found last week by police at a Roma settlement in central Greece.

The couple, Eleftheria Dimopoulou and Christos Sali, said the girl was given to them by her Bulgarian mother who could not look after her. They have been charged with abducting a minor and detained in jail pending trial.

Bulgarian prosecutors are investigating whether the biological mother, Sasha Ruseva, 35, sold her child. Ruseva denies this, but admits leaving a seven-month-old baby in Greece - where she was working as an olive-picker - in 2009 because she could not look after the child and had to return to Bulgaria.

Ruseva and her husband Atanas Ruseva are the parents of nine other children. They live in this Roma settlement, in a ramshackle house with a mud floor and unfinished roof in the Bulgarian town of Nikolaevo. Maria's pink bedroom lies empty.

Instead Maria is being looked after by a Greek charity, which says it has received several requests from Greece and abroad to adopt Maria.

Bulgarian officials declined to comment on whether Bulgaria would now seek the return of the child. Bulgarian social services authorities said they were ready to accommodate the girl if necessary.