The discovery of a young blonde girl in a Roma camp in Greece has raised hopes for many desperate parents of missing children across Europe. Greek aid group Smile of the Child, which has taken in the girl, has received more than 8,000 calls from around the world since she was discovered by police in a Roma camp in central Greece last week. “Often it is parents who have lost a child and hope there are similarities between their child and the one they have found,” said Delphine Moralis of Missing Children Europe. “Many call and ask: ‘Is that my little girl?'” she said. The girl, initially thought to be four years old but later confirmed to be five or six years old during dental examinations, was being kept by a Roma couple who were remanded in custody on Monday on suspicion of being abducted. The couple, a 39-year-old man and his 40-year-old wife, deny the allegations and claim that the girl was voluntarily handed over by her Bulgarian Roma mother, who was unable to care for the girl. Greek authorities are investigating nearly a dozen missing child cases from at least four countries in connection with the little girl, including cases from the United States, Sweden, Poland and France. Cross-border police agency Interpol has sent the girl’s photo and DNA profile to all of its 190 member countries. It also led to a case that drew comparisons with Ireland: Police abducted a seven-year-old girl with blonde hair and blue eyes from a Roma family in a Dublin suburb and temporarily took a two-year-old boy into care. For some parents, the case has raised the issue of alleged child abductions by the Roma community. “My family and I are delighted to hear the news that a four-year-old girl has been found in a gypsy camp,” Kerry Needham, whose son Ben was just 21 months old when he disappeared on the Greek island of Kos in 1991, told ITV. The boy, from Sheffield in the UK, disappeared after travelling to Kos with his mother and grandparents, where they were renovating a farmhouse in the village of Iraklise. “We have always believed that Ben’s abduction was linked to the Roma movement,” Needham said. “We hope that the investigation into Ben’s disappearance will now be reopened.” Roma groups warn against drawing mud on the whole community. However, Roma groups warned against jumping to conclusions and tarring the whole community with kidnapping allegations. “If a crime has been committed in Greece, and that is by no means clear, the perpetrators should be treated as individuals and not as representatives of their ethnicity,” the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre said in a statement. “Such a case could occur in any racial, ethnic, religious or national group,” it said. In Europe, about 250,000 children disappear each year, Moralis said, although many of them are runaways or are taken away by their parents in custody battles. The “really disturbing disappearances” account for only two to five percent of cases, or about 5,000 to 12,000 cases a year. Critics complain that there is no central European database of missing children, nor a Europe-wide authority to manage the cases. Experts say that every case in which a missing child is found – such as the discovery of the abducted Austrian girl Natascha Kampusch in 2006 and the rescue of three abducted girls in Cleveland earlier this year – raises hopes among desperate parents whose own children have vanished. The parents of British girl Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in May 2007 just days before her fourth birthday, were among those who said the girl’s discovery in Greece had given them more hope of finding their daughter alive. “It can give hope to families and justify them continuing to search and fight for their children,” said Alain Boulay, who founded the French association APEV for parents of missing children in 1991 after the kidnapping and murder of his daughter Delphine.