Spain's Rajoy refuses pardon to woman jailed for suing nun who sold her as a stolen infant

Ascensión López, the Spanish woman sentenced in July to five months in prison for slandering a nun accused of taking her from her biological mother and handing her to pro-Franco adoptive parents in 1962, has been denied a pardon by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

López, too poor to pay €40,000 ($46,000) in damages, will be the first person to be jailed over Spain's enormous baby-snatching racket stemming from the Franco era. An estimated 30,000 babies were absconded and sold by Catholic Church clergy to supporters of the fascist, 1939-75 dictatorship.

"I have a bone-wasting disease, I have not been able to work for three years and my two children are unemployed and have no contact with their father," a tearful López told the BBC.

According to López, her adoptive father, a senior figure in Gen. Francisco Franco's regime in Almería whose marriage was barren, bought her for 250,000 pesetas (about $57,000 in today's money) via his niece, Dolores Baena, a nun working in a Seville hospital at the time.

"My imprisonment is being used as a warning to the other victims of the baby theft ring," López said after the sentencing. "But even if I go to jail, I will remain freer than those who are prisoners of their own lies."

At: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40447215

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Ascensión López