|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2016 1:56:17 GMT
 A mother broke down in court as she described the moment her three-day-old daughter was snatched from her hospital cot by someone dressed as a nurse nearly two decades ago.  Nearly 18 years later the mother Celeste Nurse and her daughter Zephany were reunited, after the mother's other daughter befriended her at school. A South African woman is now on trial accused of snatching the baby girl and raising her as her own for 19 years just a mile away from her parent's house in a run down Cape Town suburb. The case of missing Zephany Nurse was one of the country’s biggest and longest running news stories. Like the British case of Madeleine McCann , who vanished ten years later and to whom she has been compared, Zephany's birthday was marked each year by a new appeal for information about her whereabouts. |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 29, 2016 5:22:07 GMT
 A mother who was reunited with a daughter nearly 18 years after she was snatched from the maternity ward in South Africa broke down today as she faced the woman accused of taking her. Celeste Nurse wept as she recalled the day her little girl - known as "South Africa's Madeleine McCann" - was abducted from her hospital cot by a woman "dressed like a nurse". The girl, now 18, was reunited with her parents last year following an extraordinary twist in the hunt for her in which she befriended the couple's other daughter at school. A seamstress, 50, who cannot be named because it would identify the girl, denies kidnapping the baby, who her parents had named Zephany.  She raised the child as her own just a mile or so from where the girl's biological parents lived, in a run-down suburb of Cape Town. Ms Nurse, 37, sobbed uncontrollably as she recalled the day her newborn was taken as she recovered from a caesarean section in a bed nearby. She told the court: "The child was crying and there was a person sitting at the door. I couldn't function properly because I was under medication. "The woman said to me 'your baby is crying'. She asked me if she could pick up the child, I said she could and that's all I can remember." |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2016 1:13:10 GMT
A seamstress accused of snatching a baby from a maternity ward in South Africa nearly 18 years ago told a court today she bought her for £50 from a mystery woman at a train station. The 50-year-old is accused of abducting three-day-old Zephany Nurse, known as South Africa’s Madeleine McCann, from her hospital cot.  She told the court in Cape Town she hid a miscarriage from her husband and turned to a mystery woman called 'Sylvia' who promised to provide her with fertility pills or help her adopt. She told Western Cape High Court: 'The woman told me about a young girl who was interested in putting her baby for adoption. I said we could talk about it.' She said she arranged to meet the woman at the station in a suburb of Cape Town a few days later but another woman arrived and gave her a baby.  She went on: 'Suddenly this lady approached me with a baby in her hands. She asked me if I was waiting for Sylvia, I said "yes".'She said "Sylvia told me to give you this baby and go to Retreat Hospital and phone her from there". So I put the baby in my arms and went to the hospital.'  She said she phoned Sylvia, who told her the baby had been put up for adoption by a mother who didn't want her. Sylvia said she would send the adoption papers, she told the court. 'Something felt so wrong. I didn't have any adoption papers or anything,' the woman said. |
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 16, 2016 21:22:45 GMT
A seamstress who kidnapped a three-day-old baby and raised her as her own for nearly 18 years was today jailed for ten years for 'causing so much harm' to the girl and her devastated birth parents.  The 51-year-old woman had 'betrayed and lied' to the stolen child, the judge told her in a stinging rebuke, before he sent her to the cells. Outside court, the kidnapper's relatives and the birth family of the girl - who has become known as South Africa's Madeleine McCann - came close to blows following the short, but tense hearing in Cape Town.  The story of how the girl named Zephany by her birth parents, Morne and Celeste, was snatched from her sleeping mother's arms in April 1997, has gripped South Africa for almost two decades. |
|
