Doctor accused of selling babies goes on trial

THE FIRST trial proceedings will be brought tomorrow against those allegedly connected with a Spanish babysnatching network believed by campaigners to have sold as many as 300,000 children.

The network was thought to have started in the Forties. Dr Eduardo Vela, an 85-year-old Madrid gynaecologist, stands accused of the alleged theft of Inés Madrigal, then a newborn, in 1969.

Ms Madrigal, now 49, persuaded her adoptive mother, Inés Pérez, to testify before an investigating judge before she died in 2016. After being introduced to Dr Vela in early 1969 by a priest, Mrs Pérez said the gynaecologist had showed her how to pretend she was pregnant by stuffing a pillow under her dress. Later, he called her to his Madrid clinic to hand her a baby girl as “a gift”.

Dr Vela has recognised his signature on a birth certificate that says Ms Madrigal’s adoptive parents were her biological progenitors. But he told the investigating judge he signed many documents without reading their contents over a 20-year period as the medical director at San Ramon.

The small clinic was connected with illegal adoptions after dozens of mothers claimed they were deceived into giving up their children or were told their babies had died.

Dr Vela admitted in a 2010 hidden- camera interview by the newspaper El Mundo that he had burned the files from his clinic because “they were super dangerous for me”.

Ms Madrigal told The Daily Telegraph: “I believe he may have begun organising adoptions in a humanitarian way, to help prostitutes and other unfortunate women. But at some point it became a business.”

Ms Madrigal is among a handful of people whose cases have not been shelved by Spanish prosecutors.