An elderly Spanish doctor who became the first person to stand trial over the country’s infamous “stolen babies” scandal has been found guilty of all charges but acquitted because the statute of limitations had expired. 
 
 Eduardo Vela, who worked as a gynaecologist at the San Ramón clinic in Madrid, had been accused of taking Inés Madrigal from her biological mother in the spring of 1969 and giving her to the 46-year-old woman who was falsely certified as her birth mother and who would raise her. 
 
 Prosecutors had sought an 11-year prison sentence for Vela on charges of unlawful detention, falsifying official documents and certifying a nonexistent birth. 
 
 Judges at Madrid’s provincial court on Monday said that Vela’s landmark trial, which began at the end of June, had “indisputably proved” that he had committed the three offences and it was “crystal clear” the doctor, now 85, had faked official documents and handed the baby over to a couple who were not her parents. 
 
 Franco's cruel legacy: the film that wants to stop Spain forgetting Read more 
 
 However, they ruled that too much time had passed for a conviction since Madrigal could not have been unlawfully detained once she became an adult and had only brought her complaint against Vela six years ago. 
 
 “As a consequence of all the above, and noting that the complainant reached her majority on 4 June 1987, and that the statute of limitations for the most serious crime – unlawful detention – is 10 years, and that the complaint was brought in April 2012, the crimes have expired under the statue of limitations,” they said in their judgment. 
 
 The trial was a test case for the thousands of families who are thought to have been caught up in the illegal practice, which began shortly after Franco’s victory in the civil war and continued until well after the dictator’s death in 1975. 
 
 According to some estimates, as many as 300,000 babies may have been taken from their birth mothers and placed with families who supported the Franco regime. Some of the stolen children are thought to have been placed with families in the US and Latin America. 
 
 Among those women targeted were single mothers, those with “degenerate” political views or those from poor backgrounds. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Eduardo Vela. Photograph: web 
 
 Madrigal, whose mother told her she was adopted when she turned 18, described the court’s decision as “bittersweet” and said she would appeal against it. 
 
 “I feel good because the judges acknowledged the theft, but of course I don’t agree with the statute of limitations point,” she told the Guardian. 
 
 Her lawyer, Guillermo Peña, had argued that the statute of limitations should not apply to his client’s case as she had not discovered she had in fact been stolen – rather than just adopted – until 2010. 
 
 “I didn’t know about any of that in 1987,” said Madrigal. “But Vela’s lawyer brought up the statute of limitations again and again during the trial – right from the start. And yet the Madrid provincial court has always been opposed to the statute of limitations and had previously always found in our favour.” 
 
 Madrigal said the next step would be an appeal before the supreme court. 
 
 “We’re going to keep fighting.” 
 
 Madrigal said her mother, who died two years ago at the age of 93, had supported her efforts to find justice and answers. 
 
 “I always say she didn’t give birth to me but I was born in her heart,” she said before the trial. “She lived to look after me and see me happy.” 
 
 Madrigal, a railway worker and president of the Murcia branch of the SOS Stolen Babies association, had also acknowledged that the proceedings were unlikely to bring her real closure or help her find her birth mother. 
 
 Vela, who oversaw the clinic for 20 years, told the court that he could not remember details of how it was run. A policeman who investigated the case concluded that the hospital had been used as a source of trafficked babies, and said that Vela had told him that he had burned the archive files. 
 
 Madrigal said she hoped her legal action would be first of many brought by stolen babies and their families, arguing that people like her had been torn from their parents, trafficked and ignored for too long. 
 
 She said some of the stolen children had been placed with families in countries including the US, Mexico and Chile. 
 
 “We were Europe’s baby supermarket and babies were stolen for 60 years,” she said. ||||| Ines Madrigal speaks to journalists outside a court in Madrid, Spain, Monday Oct. 8, 2018. A Spanish court has ruled that a doctor stole a newborn child nearly five decades ago, one of many abducted during... (Associated Press) 
 
 Ines Madrigal speaks to journalists outside a court in Madrid, Spain, Monday Oct. 8, 2018. A Spanish court has ruled that a doctor stole a newborn child nearly five decades ago, one of many abducted during Spain's 20th-century dictatorship, but cleared him because the statute of limitations had expired.... (Associated Press) 
 
 MADRID (AP) — A Spanish court ruled Monday that a doctor stole a newborn child nearly five decades ago, one of the many abducted during Spain's 20th-century dictatorship, but cleared him because the statute of limitations had expired. 
 
 The Madrid court said 85-year-old gynecologist Eduardo 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. 
 
 The court did find, however, that Vela was responsible for abducting Madrigal in 1969, faking her birth by her adoptive parents and forging official documents. 
 
 Monday's verdict is Spain's first in relation to the wide-scale child trafficking that took place from the onset of the country's Civil War in 1936 to the death of dictator Gen. 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 labor. 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 epicenter of the scandal, denied the accusations during this year's trial. 
 
 Madrigal, who learned at 18 that she wasn't living with her biological parents, argued that 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 "bittersweet" and announced she would be appealing it 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 told reporters, adding that "the judges should had been brave." 
 
 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 on the more than 30,000 children that were under the care of the regime. ||||| article 
 
 Did doctors and the Catholic Church traffic in stolen newborns? Mike Elkin reports from Madrid on the shocking trial of one nun. 
 
 On his deathbed five years ago in Barcelona, Juan Moreno told his son Juan Luis the family secret: we bought you from a priest in 1969. Moreno Sr. paid 150,000 pesetas, more than what he paid for their apartment seven years earlier. DNA tests have revealed that Juan Luis’s birth certificate, which names his adoptive parents as his birth parents, is false. And Antonio Barroso, Juan Luis’s best friend, was also bought from the same priest, according to Juan Luis. The two families would take summer vacations together to Zaragoza, around 300 kilometers west of Barcelona, but the men now believe the trips’ true purpose was to pay the installments on the two boys to the clergyman, Juan Luis says. 
 
 “My adoptive family gave me plenty of love, but it’s also true that my life has been a lie,” Juan Luis says over the telephone from Barcelona. 
 
 Moreno is one of thousands of Spaniards who suspect that doctors, nurses, priests, and nuns stole and sold babies between the 1960s and the early 1980s. While the 1,500 open cases vary, a common story has a woman being told her newborn has died shortly after birth. The baby is sold to another couple, and official papers are doctored so this couple appeared as the biological parents. At one infamous Madrid clinic, now closed, called San Ramón, it was reported in the Spanish media that staff kept a dead newborn in the freezer to prove to mothers that their babies had died. 
 
 Spanish police investigated a handful of cases in the early 1980s, but only within the last few years has the nationwide scope of the alleged trafficking started to take shape. 
 
 On Thursday, a Madrid judge is scheduled to question 80-year-old Sister María Gómez Valbuena on charges of illegal imprisonment (it is called illegal imprisonment instead of kidnapping because under Spanish law kidnapping involves a ransom). The case began when Marisa Torres filed accusations against the nun after meeting her daughter Pilar, now 29, for the first time last year. Torres had gone to Sister María at the Santa Cristina clinic in 1982 after seeing a magazine ad for expectant mothers who needed social assistance. Torres had separated from her husband, and the father of the baby was another man. Torres told a judge last week that after giving birth, Sister María intimidated her into giving up the child. The nun, Torres said, threatened to denounce her to authorities for being an adulteress, saying they would likely take away her 2-year-old daughter. When Pilar and her adoptive father began to investigate her roots, they spoke to Sister María. She told them Pilar’s mother was a prostitute and to forget about her, Pilar said. Sister María hasn’t responded to the charges. 
 
 Despite the recent number of cases being investigated, Spanish authorities have largely avoided the issue in the past, taking years to confirm what people had been talking about for decades (Sister María, for example, was named in a story in Interviú magazine about alleged child trafficking at her clinic in 1982). To assist those searching, Moreno and Barroso decided to found Anadir, now the largest association, of around 1,100 people, who are looking for parents, children, and siblings. 
 
 “It’s sad that the Spanish justice system is incapable of doing its job,” Moreno says. “We’ve given them false birth certificates, false death certificates, we’ve opened empty coffins, and supplied hundreds of testimonies. What more do they need?” This Thursday, the Spanish justice minister will be meeting with representatives of some of the families to discuss their grievances. 
 
 Internet groups have connected searchers across the country. Websites and Facebook pages abound with stories and pleas: 
 
 “I’m looking for my biological family. I was adopted in 1961 and my papers are full of irregularities. Thanks and good luck to everyone.” 
 
 “I’m searching for my brother or sister, born in Bilbao on January 27, 1972. They took the baby away right after the birth. Strange things happened, and a few hours later they told my mother that the baby had died. They refused to show it to her.” 
 
 “I’m looking for my brother who was born on October 11, 1964 in Málaga and was said to have died four days later, but it doesn’t appear that he was buried. We know that the dates and places of birth are not reliable.” 
 
 
 
 Courts are now looking into baby-trafficking cases in Valencia, the Basque Country, Madrid, Catalonia, Andalusia, and the Canary Islands. 
 
 “I view this baby-stealing network like a mafia,” says Enrique Vila, a Valencia-based lawyer who works on behalf of the five associations that provide support for people looking for their biological families. “If this wasn’t organized, how did babies born in Valencia end up in Galicia, around 1,000 kilometers away?” The Catholic Church in Spain has declined to respond to the allegations, and declined to talk to The Daily Beast for this story. Vila, who was adopted and suspects he might have been taken from his biological mother, said that he believes hospital staff perpetrated these thefts for money and the church acted as a distribution network. “The nuns and priests justified what they did by saying that the child was better off with the adoptive family, but they still took the money,” he said. 
 
 Even legal adoptions signed by a judge and sealed by a notary have been found to contain false information, as revealed in numerous investigations brought by adopted children and their families. So there is a heightened sense of uncertainty among Spanish adoptees. Last year in Barcelona, during the first meeting between a mother and her 40-year-old daughter, the latter read her own death certificate. 
 
 With nothing to trust, Spaniards are erring on the side of suspicion. But sometimes the trails don’t lead to trafficking. Last year a woman from León, Spain, whose twin sister supposedly died at birth, began to question the official story after reading about other cases in the press. On the Internet she found a woman who shared the same age and an uncanny resemblance. DNA tests, however, came back negative. Likewise, a few recent grave exhumations and subsequent DNA tests showed no wrongdoing. Nevertheless, other exhumations have revealed coffins filled with rocks, an adult femur, and the bones of another baby, according to various reports in the Spanish media. 
 
 Allegations of church-condoned baby trafficking are not confined to Spain. Investigations by the press and the government into similar allegations in Australia found that Catholic hospitals from the 1950s to 1970s coerced women using drugs to sign adoption papers or to simply knock them out long enough to whisk the baby away. Catholic Health Australia, the largest nongovernment health provider in the country, has formally apologized for what happened. 
 
 Get The Beast In Your Inbox! Daily Digest Start and finish your day with the smartest, sharpest takes from The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet A speedy, smart summary of news and must-reads from The Daily Beast and across the Web By clicking "Subscribe," you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Subscribe Thank You! You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason 
 
 The effects of the Spanish trafficking have reached the United States as well. Austin-based Randy Ryder thought he was born in the Spanish city of Málaga to his Austrian mother and American father, but the truth came out 12 years ago. Last October, Ryder appeared in a BBC report because a Spanish woman believed him to be her lost brother. DNA tests proved negative, but his biological mother, who now lives in London, saw the show and reached out to him on Facebook. This time, the DNA matched. 
 
 New Yorker Maria Washbourn was born in Spain in 1961, but through the church and an intermediary was adopted by an American couple. A friend noticed a physical resemblance between her and a Madrid man, Vicente González Olaya, who writes a blog about the search for his missing older sister. “It’s a long-shot,” says González, who also covers the auto industry for El País newspaper, “but we’re waiting for the DNA results to come back.” 
 
 González has kept an online record of his investigation, an often surreal account of dealing with the church, hospitals, DNA labs, and Spain’s vast bureaucracy of registrars and archives. 
 
 The nuns, he said, told his devoutly Catholic mother that the baby had choked to death on the umbilical cord, even though his mother saw the child alive. After his parents died early last year, González started to make some inquiries. Nothing made sense.
– Fascism's shadow hung over Spain Monday as a former doctor was found guilty of stealing newborns for infertile couples—but still went unpunished, the BBC reports. A Madrid court ruled that gynecologist Eduardo Vela, 85, had taken newborn Ines Madrigal from her biological mother in 1969 and gave her to another woman who was wrongly certified as Madrigal's birth-mother. But judges said the 10-year statute of limitations for "unlawful detention" had expired, since Madrigal became an adult in 1987 and only brought the complaint in 2012, per the Guardian. "I didn’t know about any of that in 1987," says Madrigal. "But Vela’s lawyer brought up the statute of limitations again and again during the trial—right from the start." And Madrigal isn't alone: Thousands of similar cases have been reported, since General Franco's fascist regime allowed doctors to take newborns from "left-wing" mothers and give them to pro-Franco families, per the AP. Priests and nuns made lists of parents seeking children while doctors allegedly lied to mothers about what became of their kids. Even post-Franco, Spaniards often kept quiet in a society that respected the Roman Catholic Church and embraced a so-called "pact of forgetting" during the 1970s transition to democracy. But with the European Parliament pressing Spain to take action, this drama appears far from over—except for Vela, who ducked a prison sentence that prosecutors wanted to last for 11 years.