MADRID: The first trial in Spain over thousands of suspected cases of babies stolen from their mothers during the Franco era opened in Madrid on Tuesday as an 85-year-old Spanish doctor appeared in the dock.

About 50 demonstrators, many wearing yellow T-shirts with the slogan “Justice”, protested outside the court as Eduardo Vela, who worked as a gynaecologist at the now-defunct San Ramon clinic in Madrid, arrived in court.

He is accused of having in 1969 taken Ines Madrigal, now aged 49, from her biological mother, and given her to another woman who raised her and was falsely certified as her birth mother.

Prosecutors are seeking an 11-year jail term for falsifying official documents, illegal adoption, unlawful detention and certifying a non-existent birth. Vela denied any wrongdoing as he took the stand.

In a dark and often overlooked chapter of General Francisco Franco’s 1939-75 dictatorship, the newborns of some left-wing opponents of the regime, or unmarried or poor couples, were removed from their mothers and adopted and the practice was later expanded.

New mothers were frequently told their babies had died suddenly within hours of birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials when in fact they were given or sold to another family.

Madrigal, a railway worker who heads the Murcia branch of the SOS Stolen Babies association, said she did not expect Vela to provide answers about her origins or apologise.

But she hoped his two-day trial would mark a turning point that leads the authorities to reopen investigations into other “stolen babies” cases. “A mother can never forget her son,” she told reporters outside the court.

“Mothers want to tell their children that they did not abandon them... but above all they want to know that they are well.” She told the court she was “devastated emotionally” when she discovered she had been taken from her biological mother.

Vela was interviewed briefly by police after a magazine in 1982 published interviews with several women who claimed they had been cheated of their babies after giving birth at San Ramon but the probe went nowhere.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2018