A court in Spain for the first time confirmed the theft of children during the Franco regime

A court in Spain ruled today that a doctor stole a baby 50 years ago, during the dictatorship when the disappearance of newborns was a mass phenomenon in Spain, but acquitted him of criminal responsibility due to the statute of limitations. The court announced that the 2012-year-old gynecologist Eduardo Vela cannot be punished since the prosecutor Ines Madrigal approached the court only in 1969. The court, however, confirmed that Vela was responsible for the kidnapping of Madrigal in 1975, and that he had forged official documents on her birth and presented her as the child of another couple. Today's verdict is the first related to the widespread child trafficking that took place in Spain from the end of the civil war until the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 18. The right-wing Franco regime carried out a campaign of confiscating children from poor families, prisoners or political opponents. Children were often taken from their mothers with the false explanation that they had died at birth, then handed over to families loyal to the regime or to the church, which raised them on the foundations of the ruling ideology and strict Catholicism. Vela, the former director of a Madrid clinic at the center of allegations of child theft, has pleaded not guilty in proceedings that began this year. Ines Madrigal, who only found out at the age of 2010 that she did not live with her biological parents, claimed that she could not file a lawsuit earlier, as she only learned about the Francoist pattern of child theft in 30.000, when her stepmother told her the details of the events at Vela's clinic. DNA confirmed the truth of the story, but the parents of the now forty-nine-year-old Ines Madrigal have not been found. Madrigal assessed that the court's decision has both a sweet and bitter taste and announced an appeal to the Supreme Court. Her case is the only case of so-called "stolen babies" that has reached court. In the past, most such lawsuits were dismissed at the pre-trial stage due to the statute of limitations. Spain began to investigate the cases of "stolen babies" only ten years ago, when the judge of the national high court, Baltazar Garson, opened an investigation into the fate of more than XNUMX children who were placed in the care of the state during the Franco dictatorship.