They told me little Rebecca was dead - but I believe she was stolen to order by Spain's evil baby snatchers

• Ruth Appleby's daughter died shortly after her birth at a Spanish hospital
• Ruth believes baby Rebecca, born 1992, was stolen and sold for adoption
  
• Thousands 'stolen and sold' by group of nuns, doctors and officials
  
• The supposed baby thefts were carried out between 1960 and 1990
  

By POLLY DUNBAR

PUBLISHED: 22:00 GMT, 9 March 2013 | UPDATED: 22:23 GMT, 9 March 2013

t has been two decades since Ruth Appleby lost her daughter, but she admits she has never recovered. 

Since her baby died in a Spanish hospital within hours of being born, Ruth has thought daily about Rebecca, the child she never knew.

She marked her birthdays with cards and gifts, travelled to place flowers on Rebecca’s grave and, when she returned to live in her native Britain, had the infant’s remains cremated so they could be with her at her home in North Yorkshire.

Agonising as it must be to lose a longed-for baby, however, it is difficult to imagine a scenario more  harrowing than the one now confronting Ruth thanks to a discovery, made last year, which casts a disturbing new light upon everything she thought she knew about her daughter’s death.

Ruth is convinced that Rebecca did not die at all, but instead fell victim to a scandal engulfing Spain, a criminal conspiracy that, with its roots deep in the era of General Franco, has seen an estimated 300,000 babies trafficked by a network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns.

She has come to the horrific conclusion that her daughter was stolen from her by medical staff and sold for adoption. 

It is an extraordinary claim, but in the context of the details emerging from Spain, an all-too convincing one.

Police in Britain and Madrid are investigating and Foreign Secretary William Hague is supporting her case. 

Meanwhile, Ruth, a 49-year-old teaching assistant who lives near Richmond, is left struggling to accept the realisation that Rebecca could have been living with another family all this time.

‘I’ve spent 20 years grieving for my baby, but now I no longer have any idea what I’m dealing with,’ she says.

‘Living with the unknown is so incredibly difficult. Knowing she could be out there somewhere is an amazing feeling, but she’s been brought up as somebody else’s child. I have to live with the fact I may never find out what happened to her.’

More than 1,000 Spanish families have gone to court to seek the truth about their lost children, there are demands for a national inquiry and last year the first formal charges were filed against a nun, Sister Maria Gomez Valbuena – but she recently died aged 87.

Ruth, the first foreigner to become involved in the scandal, knows discovering the truth will not be easy.  The Spanish authorities give every impression of hoping that the scandal will simply vanish; 70 per cent of claims such as hers have been automatically closed by the courts.

Ruth had lived in Spain for a decade with her former husband Howard when she gave birth to Rebecca. Howard, a fellow Briton, worked in publishing and the couple had settled in the northern city of La Coruna.

They were delighted by her pregnancy, but two weeks after her due date, she had not yet given birth and was admitted to Hospital Materno Infantil Teresa Herrera where, almost immediately, a number of odd and suspicious situations arose.

Unusually, it was not until two days later, on December 2, 1992, that she was induced. The previous day, she had an unsettling experience.

She says: ‘I was sharing a room with two other pregnant women, one of whom was supposed to be taking total bed-rest. A nurse told her off for getting up, saying: “If you don’t rest, your baby could die like this woman’s baby is going to,” pointing at me.

‘I can only assume that she thought I couldn’t speak Spanish. I was upset, but I dismissed it as the nurse  being strange, possibly because I was a foreigner.’

At 8pm, she says, two nurses gave her an injection, which they explained was morphine, a drug that can be harmful to an unborn child.  

‘I now think they were trying to delay giving me a caesarean until the middle of the night, when the hospital was quietest,’ she says.

The baby was eventually born with Ruth under general anaesthetic at 1.20am. Howard went to see the infant in the creche.

‘She looked fine; perfect. He was elated,’ Ruth says. 

At 4.30am Howard received a call telling him to return to the hospital. When he arrived, he was informed his daughter had died from heart problems, and was told it was not possible for him to see her because the post-mortem had already been carried out.

When Ruth came round at 7.30am, she says she was told baby was doing well. However, Howard arrived at her bedside and broke the news that Rebecca was dead.

‘I was in shock. I couldn’t stop  crying. A doctor visited me and told me it was very rare for this to happen, like “winning a bad lottery”, which I thought was incredibly insensitive. I couldn’t understand it, but I had no reason not to trust the doctors.’

FULL STORY: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290686/They-told-little-Re...