Sister María implicated in new stolen baby case

The name of Sister María Gómez Valbuena, so far the only person to be implicated in ongoing investigations into the disappearance of children from the former Santa Cristina maternity clinic, has appeared in a new case of suspected baby-snatching.

A judge on Monday took testimony from a couple who filed a complaint with the Attorney General's Office over the disappearance of their child, who was born in Madrid's La Paz hospital in 1980. An initial DNA test on a girl who now lives in Murcia gave the couple a 99-percent chance of having found their daughter. The signature of Sister María is on the documentation for the child's 1981 adoption, and is also to be found on several related invoices sent to the adoptive parents.

The nun was called to testify last month over accusations she stole babies to sell into adoption while at Santa Cristina.

"I haven't seen her or spoken to her," Luis Sánchez said of his possible child outside court. "We don't want to do so until a judge tells us she is our daughter. We don't want to get our hopes up only for it to come to nothing."

The investigating judge in the case also took a statement from a former neighbor of the couple, who worked at La Paz at the time the child went missing. "Nobody at the hospital told us that the baby had died. It was her, our neighbor, who ran to us and told us that she had disappeared," said Sánchez. During testimony, the neighbor said she couldn't recall telling the couple about their baby because it was a long time ago.

"They told us she had died and I always thought that she had died," added Sánchez, who began to suspect otherwise when he saw the media coverage of other families taking their cases to the prosecutor's office. Some 1,500 families across Spain have reported a stolen child. Several families in Madrid have claimed their newborns were stolen by Sister María during the 1980s.

Sánchez's wife, Petra Gallardo, believed that her daughter may still be alive, given that neither she nor her husband ever saw her body. Hospital staff told them that it had been taken to a university to be examined, but the university in question has confirmed in writing that this never happened. Furthermore, the couple was told that they had had a boy, not a girl.