Basques to investigate baby thefts

The decision by Juan Galporsoro, chief public prosecutor of the Basque Country's court of justice, to launch an investigation follows new claims this week that newborn babies were stolen from hospitals and makeshift maternity clinics.

One alleged case is that of Maria Dolores Chumillas, a single mother from Murcia. Cast out by her family, she moved to Bilbao 30 years ago where she gave birth to a child in a secret clinic set up in a flat.

It is alleged her baby was one of many sold for around 200,000 pesetas (1,000). Mothers, many of them Republican sympathisers, were told their babies had died or were pressed to have their child adopted.

Ms Chumillas had been put in contact with an "adoption" organisation through a priest according to Anadir, the association fighting for the stolen children and their families.

It is estimated there could have been as many as 300,000 stolen children cases during General Francisco Franco's 1939-75 dictatorship and up to the end of the late 1980s.

In the first episode of the documentary Give Me Back My Son broadcast on Catalan station TV3 this week, a former doctor at the San Francisco Javier Clinic in Bilbao admitted there were adoption irregularities when he described how any trace of the biological mother's name and information was wiped from official records.

Producers of the documentary claim that at first babies were stolen from their legitimate Republican parents because the Franco regime believed the "Reds" were an inferior race to Nationalist Catholics. The social censure facing single mothers was also a factor in the alleged trade.