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ARCHIVED - Possible stolen baby case comes to light during Civil War exhumation in Alicante
An empty infant-sized coffin has been found in the Municipal Cemetery of Alicante
Since the death in October 2019 of Doctor Eduardo Vela, the first doctor to stand trial in relation to the “stolen babies” scandal in Spain, it has seemed increasingly unlikely that cases of infants having allegedly been taken from their parents during Franco’s regime and the years immediately following the dictator’s death will ever be resolved, but the issue remains a controversial one and a recent finding at the main cemetery of Alicante has again thrust the matter into the media spotlight.
Dr Eduardo Vela died approximately a year after a trial in which he was found “incontrovertibly” responsible for handing over a new-born baby to a couple named Pablo Madrigal Revilla and Inés Pérez Pérez, but at the same time it was ruled that the crimes of falsifying documentation, illegally taking the baby into his charge and others did not merit punishment because responsibility for them had expired since 1969, when the incident took place.
The baby concerned, Inés Madrigal, was the one to bring the case to court, and there was huge media interest as very few cases of “stolen baby” allegations have ever been satisfactorily investigated. Sra Madrigal eventually found out the identity of her biological parents after searching for 32 years and, after meeting her brothers for the first time revealed that in fact, strictly speaking, she was not “stolen” but voluntarily given for adoption by her parents: no money changed hands, and it would have been an injustice if Eduardo Vela had been found guilty of profiting from handing the unwanted baby over to loving parents.
With the passing of the years it is now becoming very difficult for any further light to be shed on the allegations, but last week a team of archaeologists at the Municipal Cemetery of Alicante unearthed a small wooden box containing the remains of no bones but instead two fragments of tile. Due to its size, similar to that of a coffin for a new-born infant, and the lack of remains inside, the suspicion is that it could have been part of a “fake” burial carried out to hoodwink the parents into believing that their child had passed away.
The indications are that the presumed coffin would have been buried in approximately 1963 or 1964, while the nature and purpose of the tiling fragments are unclear.
These are the preliminary conclusions of the team from ArqueoAntro which had been searching for the unmarked remains of 11 victims of Civil War persecution with the intention of exhuming and identifying them before handing them to relatives for a dignified burial, and the facts have been reported by the regional government to the courts of Alicante for further investigation.
Image: ArqueoAntro