By Moscow
Russians reacted with horror to the story of a seven-year-old Siberian boy adopted by an American family who was sent back to Moscow alone - because his US mother didn't want him any more.
Artem Saveliev was last year taken from a grim orphanage and given a new life in Tennessee. But his adoptive mother, Torry-Ann Hansen, a 26-year-old nurse, put him on a 10-hour flight on Thursday as an unaccompanied minor with a note "to whom it may concern" saying: "I no longer wish to parent this child."
In his rucksack she had put sweets, biscuits and colouring pens for the journey. She did not tell him she was rejecting him, saying he was going on an "excursion" to Moscow.
In the typed note, which the blond boy was clutching when Moscow police picked him up, she said she wanted the adoption annulled and accused the Vladivostok orphanage of misleading her about the child's behavioural problems.
The Russians angrily denied this, saying he was stubborn, but that his only disability was that he was flat-footed.
The Kremlin's children's rights commissioner, Pavel Astakhov, lambasted the US mother, who is understood to be a nurse and a single parent with a natural son, and called for a ban on all adoptions to America in light of this case.
Russian officials refused the US consul access to the child, saying: "If his American parent kicked out him from the country on a plane like a sack of potatoes, then we will look after the boy. Our care system will take up the case. After a full medical examination, he will be placed in one of our orphanages."
He questioned how American immigration had let the child leave Washington, and why United Airlines had carried him alone to Moscow. Stringent checks are applied on minors travelling alone.
It appears the child was also alone when he flew from Tennessee to Washington before boarding the flight to Moscow.
Son
The official, who said he played with the child and talked to him, said the mother had another son called Logan.
"Artem said he made good friends with Logan," he said. "He was talking quite calmly about the family, but when he started to talk about his mother he began to cry, showing how she dragged him by the hair."
In a typed letter she gave Artem to take with him to Moscow, she revealed how she adopted him in September 2009.
She claimed he is "mentally unstable" and that his problems were hidden from her by Russian orphanage officials.
"He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues/behaviour. I was lied to and misled by the Russian orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability," she wrote. "They chose to grossly misrepresent those problems to get him out of their orphanage.
"After giving my best to this child I am sorry to say that for the sake of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child. As he is a Russian national, I am returning him to your guardianship and would like the adoption disannulled (sic)."
Experts fear the effects will be traumatic for the boy.
Having put the child on the plane, Hansen found a Russian tour guide on the Internet who agreed to meet the child at the airport and hand him over.
Adoption officials in Partizansk, near Vladivostok, were stunned, saying that the woman had made a good impression on them when she went through adoption procedures last year. "She seemed a nice, kind woman. Artem immediately reached out to her. She even learned a few Russian words to communicate with him," said one official.
They deny her claims about behavioural problems and being mentally unstable.
"Artem is normal for his age," said the official. "He is a stubborn child, but this is not a problem for loving parents. We are shocked by how the American family has treated our child. Artem grew up as a completely normal, relatively advanced child for his age, and healthy. Does she count being flat-footed as a disability?
"No other medical abnormalities were found. The child was completely ready for school and had learned to read when the American mother came to the orphanage."