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 Entertainment | September 2006 
Mexican Father Fends Off Norwegian Reality Show Detective Trying to Take His Son
 Ioan Grillo - Associated Press
| “It's disgraceful that for entertainment they are putting a 10-year-old kid and his life in danger.”
- Marco Garcia |
Mexico City – A Norwegian reality show is filming the search in Mexico for a 10-year-old boy who lives here with his Mexican father, claiming the father kidnapped the child and that both are now in hiding. The father claims he has full custody and says he is shocked that his family is being exploited on television.
On Monday, the Norwegian television network TVNorge aired an episode of its show “Savnet,” or “Missing,” focusing on the search for businessman Marco Garcia and his son Thor, who it said were in hiding.
“Reality shows can go too far,” Garcia said in a face-to-face interview with The Associated Press in Mexico City on Wednesday night. “It's disgraceful that for entertainment they are putting a 10-year-old kid and his life in danger.”
Thor was born in 1996 to Garcia and Norwegian Laila Osmo. In 1999, when Thor was 3, the couple broke up and Garcia returned with his son to Mexico.
Garcia said a Mexican court granted him custody of Thor in 2002 after Osmo failed to attend the hearings. Osmo then hired private detective Ola Thune and went to various Norwegian newspapers saying her son had been kidnapped.
“The Norwegian papers didn't do their homework. They just showed her side of the story,” he said.
Garcia said the upcoming episode of “Savnet” shows Thune tracking him down by finding out where he has sent e-mails from.
“It's absurd. They never needed to track me down, because I was never in hiding,” Garcia said.
Garcia says that Thune has boasted to Norwegian newspapers that he will “rescue” Thor on the television show.
“They should leave me in peace and let me live with my dad and have a normal life,” said Thor, who accompanied his father to the interview.
TVNorge's information director, Jens-Petter Gjelseth, said the station had carefully reviewed the program before it was broadcast Monday, and is confident that it is correct.
“We have gone through it many times and believe we have backing for what we reported,” he said.
The reporter in the program, Per Asle Rustad, also said by telephone that the program is correct, and said Garcia appears to be playing for sympathy in the Mexican news media.
“Marco has been charged with the kidnapping of his son in Norway. And he is wanted through Interpol. Those are facts,” Rustad said.
“It is correct that he got custody in a Mexican court because she didn't appear,” he said, referring to Osmo. “She didn't appear because she did not know about the hearing.” A Norwegian court, meanwhile, gave Osmo full custody of Thor, Rustad said. He said Osmo, who lives in the western Norway city of Bergen, has not seen her son for seven years.
Of Garcia's claim that he had not been in hiding, Gjelseth said Osmo managed to get the Mexican courts to open the case again, but had been unable to proceed because it could not find Garcia to serve a summons.
“When we came into the picture, the court was unable to find him, but we did,” Rustad said.
“According to the Hague Convention (on kidnapped children), which Mexico and Norway have both ratified, the boy should go back to his mother. There is no doubt. But they (the Mexican courts) appear to be protecting their own citizen.”
Two Norwegian justice ministers have been involved in the case, including the current minister, Knut Storberget, who wrote to Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez demanding that Thor be returned to Norway and to his mother, according to the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten. It said there has been no answer. No one from the Foreign Relations Department could be reached immediately for comment Thursday.
Thune, reached by telephone in Norway, declined to comment. |
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