Doctor set free despite stealing newborn baby and forging papers

A Spanish court has ruled a doctor stole a newborn child nearly five decades ago – one of the many abducted during Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship.

The Madrid court said 85-year-old gynaecologist Eduardo Vela must be cleared because the statute of limitations had expired.

Vela could not be punished because one of those who were stolen – plaintiff Ines Madrigal – did not make her complaint until 2012, more than a decade after the gravest crime had taken place.

However, the court did find Vela was responsible for abducting Madrigal in 1969, faking her birth by her adoptive parents and forging official documents.

Yesterday’s verdict is Spain’s first in relation to the widescale child trafficking that took place from the onset of the country’s civil war in 1936 to the death of dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975. The right-wing regime waged a campaign to take away the children of poor families, prisoners or political enemies, sometimes stripping women of their newborns by lying and saying they had died during labour.

The children were then given to pro-franco families or the church, who educated the children on the regime’s ideology and on Roman Catholicism.

Vela – the director of a Madrid clinic considered to be at the epicentre of the scandal – denied the accusations during this year’s trial.

Madrigal, who learned at 18 she was not living with her biological parents, argued she couldn’t have lodged her complaint earlier because she only learned about the scheme in 2010 when her adopting mother, who died three years later, disclosed the details of what had happened at Vela’s clinic.

DNA tests confirmed the account, but Madrigal’s biological parents were never found. Madrigal, now 49, said she considered the provincial court’s verdict to be “bitter sweet”. She announced she would be appealing the decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

“I’m happy because the judges are acknowledging that there was theft, that I was taken away from my mother, but I didn’t think they would stop short of convicting him,” she said.

Madrigal’s was the only case of “stolen babies”, as they are known in Spain, that has made it to the trial stage. Most lawsuits have been rejected in the past by courts for coming after the statute of limitations expired.

Spain only started investigating the “stolen babies” cases a decade ago when National Court magistrate Baltasar Garzon opened a probe into more than 30,000 children that were under the regime’s care.