"I bought my son, and he died; it was a divine punishment"

"I bought my son Lucas. I paid almost three million pesetas for him - going up to my ears in debt. Unfortunately, Lucas died in a fire when he was 18. I believe it was a punishment for having bought him. Lucas is dead because we didn't deserve him."

Manuel Espí Nacher, 77, cannot hold back the tears, as Lucas smiles out from an outsize photograph, taken on the day of his first communion. Since the shady operation of the purchase, almost 30 years have gone by. Even so, Manuel is one of the few such purchase-parents willing to confess openly that he bought a newborn child.

He says it was his wife, María Martínez Lluch, who yearned to be a mother. "If you let me adopt this child, I'll never ask you for anything more," she said.

Manuel and Maria, of the Valencian town of Ontinyent, had been to gynecologists for years until one, "who was more honest than the others," told them they could never have a child.

They decided to adopt a baby. Thus began an interminable circuit among orphanages and foundling houses in towns such as Cuenca and Teruel, all without result. An institution run by nuns in Zaragoza told them they could adopt a child, but it had to be a disabled one. "We wanted a healthy child," Lucas' adoptive father recalls.

Manuel is not well himself. He suffers a bipolar disturbance, and remembers that at that time he was thinking of suicide. He went to a faith healer called Petra, who put the couple back on the track of adoption. This eventually led them to the door of the hospital Virgen del Consuelo in Valencia, where a woman asked Manuel how much money he was carrying. He told her a smaller amount at first, but ended by admitting he had 750,000 pesetas - which all went into her handbag.

This woman, the initial contact, was a prostitute, he later found out.

"She gave us directions to go to the incubator section. There we were met by another woman, of about 20, who gave us Lucas. Before we left, she asked me to go with her to another room, to sign some papers. I told my wife to take the child out to the car and, when the girl wasn't looking, I slipped away without signing anything."

They suspected that what they had done was not legal, and this was confirmed when further requests for money began. Some weeks later Manuel was called to a lawyers' office in Valencia, a few blocks from the hospital, where 300,000 pesetas were demanded for "legal formalities." Manuel flew into a rage, saying he had already paid. "They replied that if the money was not forthcoming, we would go to jail. We believed them; we were both practically illiterate. We paid up." Further blackmail followed, and Manuel went into debt to pay it, but after about three million pesetas (the equivalent of 18,000 eurosin today's money) they stopped asking for more.

The child was provided with a Libro de Familia (Family Book), the vital registration document for any Spanish child which was to all appearances legal. How it came into being, without any medical certificate from a gynecologist who had been present at the birth is an interesting question.

Lucas grew to be a teenager, little interested in studies but with a passion for motorcycles. He worked in a gas station, but dreamed of competition riding. Then one day he was caught in a sudden fire, and died. Manuel still believes he and his wife have been "punished" for doing wrong.