MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish police arrested a woman who allegedly abducted a newborn from a hospital in the northern city of Bilbao by posing as a nurse, before abandoning the baby unharmed nearby, officials said on Thursday.
According to a preliminary investigation, the suspect walked into a ward wearing a nurse’s uniform at around 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) on Wednesday and picked up the newborn. She told staff she was going to carry out a blood test, said Josu Erkoreka, the Basque regional government’s head of security.
The baby, since safely reunited with his family, was found on Thursday morning by local resident Alicia Lopez outside her eighth-floor apartment near Basurto Hospital.
“I was making breakfast when the doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole but didn’t see anybody. I opened the door and there he was, lying on the mat,” a visibly upset Lopez told reporters.
“I got emotional, thinking: Poor parents and poor child.”
Police tracked the 24-year-old suspect down after identifying her through the hospital’s CCTV footage. She was with a friend and in an agitated state at the time of her arrest, Erkoreka said.
The suspect had opened doors to other rooms in the ward, though there was no reason to believe she was specifically looking for the baby who she snatched, he said.
The chief of the Basque health department, Gotzone Sagardui, said the hospital’s patient safety committee would investigate what appeared to be an isolated security breach.
(Reporting by David Latona; Editing by Andrei Khalip and John Stonestreet)
