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A Spanish court on Monday recognized a 85-year-old doctor guilty of kidnapping a newborn baby from his mother under Franco dictatorship, but refrained from condemning him in the first scandal trial. "stolen babies".
The Madrid court ruled that the act had been committed too long ago for the defendant to be legally convicted.
He said former gynecologist Eduardo Vela guilty of kidnapping 49-year-old Ines Madrigal from her mother while she was born in 1969.
During and after the dictatorship of 1939-1975, thousands of babies were abducted from their mother, who had been announced dead after birth.
Babies were adopted by infertile couples, preferably close to the far right regime, often with the help of the Catholic Church.
Vela, who ran a clinic, was the first to be tried for her alleged involvement in the trafficking of babies.
Prosecutors wanted him to be jailed for eleven years.
He was accused of taking Madrigal from his biological mother and giving it to another woman, falsely certified as a birth mother.
Madrigal hopes her case will help open "thousands of closed files," even though she will never know who her real mother was.
"In this country, a person who has played God … can not go unpunished," she said in September after the hearings.
The practice of stealing babies began after Franco came to power following the 1936-1939 civil war.
– Baby traffic –
Initially, the newborns were removed to leftist opponents of the regime.
Later, the practice was extended to supposedly illegitimate babies and those from poor families.
The authors wanted children to be raised by well-to-do, conservative and pious Roman Catholic families.
Even after Spain's transition to democracy following Franco's death in 1975, illicit trafficking continued until at least 1987.
Activists say tens of thousands of babies may have been stolen from their parents in decades.
Vila has been charged with falsifying documents, illegal adoption, illegal detention and non-existent birth certificate.
During the trial, he said he did not remember details about the operation of the clinic, which he ran for 20 years until 1982.
– The files of the burned clinic –
A police officer who investigated the case and testified in court said that the clinic was a center for the trafficking of babies.
He said that Vela had burned the clinic's archives.
The policeman said that Vela was part of a "conspiracy" to take babies from single mothers into shelters often run by religious orders.
Emilie Helmbacher, a French journalist, also testified by videoconference.
In a survey conducted in Madrid in December 2013, she used a hidden camera to record Vela while he appeared to have confessed to giving Madrigal a "gift" in June 1969.
Vela's lawyer, Rafael Casas, criticized the recording by hidden camera. He stated that his client had "nothing to do" with the alleged acts.
