Spanish doc on trial in ‘stolen baby’ case

AN 85-year-old doctor appeared in the dock yesterday in the first trial in Spain over thousands of suspected cases of babies stolen from their mothers during the Franco era amid emotional protests outside the Madrid court.

Dozens of demonstrators, many wearing yellow T-shirts with the slogan “Justice,” gathered outside the court as Eduardo Vela, who worked as a gynaecologist at the nowdefunct San Ramon clinic in Madrid, arrived.

Carmen Lorente, who came to the court from the southern city of Seville to protest, said she was told her baby son suffocated in the womb in 1979 even though she recalls hearing him cry after giving birth in 1979.

“It is a very important day for all those who are affected and for all mothers. Because a precedent is created by this man sitting in the dock,” she said.

Vela is accused of having in 1969 taken Ines Madrigal, now aged 49, from her biological mother, and given her to another woman who raised her and was falsely certified as her birth mother.

Prosecutors are seeking an 11-year jail term for falsifying official documents, illegal adoption, unlawful detention and certifying a non-existent birth.

In a dark and often overlooked chapter of General Francisco Franco’s 1939-75 dictatorship, the newborns of some left-wing opponents of the regime, or unmarried or poor couples, were removed from their mothers and adopted and the practice was later expanded.

New mothers were frequently told their babies had died suddenly within hours of birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials when in fact they were given or sold to another family.

Madrigal, a railway worker who heads the Murcia branch of the SOS Stolen Babies association, said she did not expect Vela to provide answers about her origins or apologize.

But she hoped his two-day trial would mark a turning point that leads the authorities to reopen investigations into other “stolen babies” cases.

“A mother can never forget her child,” she told reporters outside the court.

She told the court she was “emotionally devastated” when she discovered she had been taken from her biological mother.