Hundreds of Spanish babies ‘stolen from clinics and sold for adoption’

Giles Tremlett in Madrid, Thursday 27 January 2011 18.56 GMT





“The father of a friend of mine admitted to him that both he and I had been bought from a priest and a nun from Zaragoza after being born in the Miguel Servet hospital,” said Antonio Barroso, who discovered four years ago that he was adopted. DNA tests have proved that the people who raised him were not his real parents.

“There are cases that are accompanied by proof in the form of DNA tests and others that are simply mothers who suspect that their babies were stolen,” said lawyer Enrique Vila, who represents the National Association of Irregular Adoptions. “We think it was an organised mafia.”

Inés Pérez, 89, has confirmed that a priest encouraged her to fake a pregnancy so she could be given a child due to be born at Madrid’s San Ramón clinic in 1969. Her adopted daughter, also called Inés, was among those demanding an investigation.

In a separate case, workers from an undertaker’s in Malaga said they sometimes buried empty children’s coffins that arrived from a local clinic.

The street outside the attorney general’s office was blocked by weeping people today hoping to discover what had become of their lost children.
