A MOTHER who secretly took her daughter from North Yorkshire to the USA to keep her away from her father has been jailed.

The girl, then 12, was kept out of school for a year to prevent the authorities finding out where the pair were, York Crown Court sitting at Harrogate heard.

Julia Harrow, prosecuting, said they lived in a “rundown” bedsit in Miami and raised funds by selling flowers.

But they were eventually discovered, the girl was brought back to Harrogate and the woman was arrested and returned to face justice in the UK. Today, the mother is serving nine months in prison.

“Clearly you were not thinking of your daughter’s welfare,” Recorder Tahir Khan QC told her. “I am satisfied your actions were motivated by the desire to deprive the father and the father’s family of contact with her. As a result they suffered anxiety and no doubt unimaginable worry and fear for her safety.”

The woman, 38, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty to removing a child from the UK without the father’s consent and breaking a court order preventing the child from leaving the UK without permission. She cannot be named for legal reasons.

Miss Harrow said the mother asked the father in January 2010 if she could take the girl to Germany to see a critically-ill relative. But before they were due to depart, the child disappeared. Police checks revealed she and the mother had driven to Amsterdam via the Channel Tunnel where they had caught a plane to New York.

For the woman, Catherine Duffy said her client had a “very close relationship with her daughter” and had suffered from the four-month separation from her child when she had been remanded in custody, first in a Floridian cell and then in a British one.