80-year-old Spanish Nun Faces Charges in Massive Baby-stealing Ring

By Philip Caulfield
New York Daily News
April 12, 2012

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/80-year-old-spanish-nun-faces-charges-massive-baby-stealing-ring-article-1.1060651?localLinksEnabled=false

Sister Maria Gomez Valbuen outside Madrid court on Thursday. She's the only person to be charged in a case involving an alleged nationwide baby-snatching ring in Spain.

An 80-year-old Spanish nun appeared in court Thursday to face charges that she kidnapped an infant girl as part of a vast baby-trafficking ring that stole newborns from poor mothers and sold them into adoption.

Sister Maria Gomez Valbuena appeared before the judge and refused to testify, invoking her right to remain silent, Reuters reported.

The aging Sisters of Charity nun was charged with kidnapping a newborn girl from a Madrid hospital in the 1980s.

A group of more than 1,000 families said she was part of a nationwide baby-snatching ring dating back four decades.

The group, Anadir, said the ring involved hundreds of doctors, nurses, priests, nuns and midwives who schemed to convince poor or unwed mothers their babies had died at birth.

The babies were then sold to families looking to adopt, and the child's birth papers were doctored, the group said.

Lawyers say Catholic priests and nuns acted as middlemen, paying hospitals workers for babies and then selling them to desperate families.

“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,” Enrique Vila, a lawyer who works for families trying to track down relatives, told The Daily Beast.

Anadir said the racket dates back to the Spanish Civil War, when Francisco Franco’s fascist minions stole babies from political prisoners, Reuters reported.

In later years, it became a money-making scheme for scores of hospitals and clinics, the group said.

Since the 1980s, Spanish police have investigated hundreds of claims from mothers who said their babies were stolen, and their stories have been well-documented in the Spanish media.

In one infamous case, workers at one Madrid clinic kept a dead newborn in the freezer, which they would show to mothers to prove their baby had died, The Daily Beast reported.

Valbuena is the first person to be charged in the scheme.

The case against her began after a woman said the nun intimated her into giving up her baby at Madrid’s Santa Cristina hospita in 1982, The Daily Beast reported.

“I was still half asleep when I asked her where my daughter was,” Marisa Torres Torres told AFP.

“She told me: ‘Stop asking me that or else I will also take away your other daughter and you will go to jail for adultery.’ ”

Torres was reunited with her now 29-year-old daughter, Pilar, last year, and said DNA tests proved they were mother and daughter, the Daily Best reported.

Outside the courthouse on Thursday, a throng of angry mothers and families jeered the nun as she was hustled to a car by police.

Paloma Perez, 55, told the AFP she believed she was stolen from her birth mother at Santa Cristina hospital in 1957.

“It is shameful, and on top of it all they protect her,” Perez said, as Valubeana’s car drove away. “I don’t even know who I am.”