Saturday, July 25, 2015
Up to 300,000 Spanish babies were stolen from their parents and sold for
adoption over a period of five decades, a BBC investigation reveals.
The children were trafficked by a secret network of doctors and nurses
in a widespread practice that began during General Franco’s Spanish
dictatorship and continued until the early Nineties. Hundreds of
families who had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling
for an official government investigation into the scandal.
Musoma. A teenage mother is
agonised after her one day-old baby was stolen by an unidentified woman
at the Mara Regional Referral Hospital.
The baby’s mother Msuba Elias,17, told The Citizen that she gave birth on Thursday at 6.05 am and that she and the infant were doing well.
She
explained that after giving birth her relatives gave her some porridge
to drink. Later the hospital’s security personnel passed at different
wards to tell patients’ relatives to leave so that nurses could go on
with their duties including cleanness.
She said that
around 8.00 am a strange woman went direct to her bed and asked her
name. Then she told her that she was needed by a nurse at ward number
eight. Since she did not know where the said ward was she asked the
woman to accompany her.
Ms Elias said the woman showed
her the ward and she went to a nurse whom she asked if she was the one
who called her. But the nurse denied having called her.
Then
she went back to the ward but when she reached there she was shocked
because her baby was not in bed. She asked another woman who was lying
in the next bed who told her that the baby was taken by one woman.
Ms
Elias said she searched for her baby at the nearby places in the
hospital to no avail and then reported the issue to the nurse on duty
who wanted her to report the case to the Musoma Central Police Station,
0.5km away.
A relative of Ms Elias told The Citizen
that they were shocked by the news. She also blamed the nurse on duty on
her irresponsibility.
She said the nurse was supposed
to report the matter to the hospital management so that urgent measures
could be taken including closing the hospital gates.
Ms Mwima Musiba said she got information on the infant’s loss a few hours after her mother reported the matter to police.
According
to Ms Musiba, Ms Elias became pregnant when she was a Form Two student
at Iyovu Secondary School in Bukombe District, Geita Region.
Mara regional police commander Philip Kalangi confirmed the incident, saying details would be given to the press later
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