South Africa’s ‘Madeleine McCann’ kidnapper jailed for taking baby

South African woman who kidnapped a newborn baby and raised her as her own for nearly 18 years jailed for 10 years.

Morne and Celeste Nurse, right, embrace each other. Picture: AP.

A South African woman who kidnapped a newborn baby and raised her as her own daughter for nearly 18 years has been jailed for 10 years by a Cape Town court.

The 52-year-old seamstress was told she had caused “so much harm” to the girl, who has become known as South Africa’s Madeleine McCann. She had “betrayed and lied” to the child, Judge John Hlope told the woman, who cannot be named.

The kidnapping victim, who was named by her birth family as Zephany Nurse, was taken from her sleeping mother at a maternity ward at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1997.

Her parents, Celeste and Morne, never gave up hope that she was alive and would return home, but it wasn’t until 2015 that an astonishing coincidence convinced them she was not only alive but living nearby.

Last year their 13-year-old daughter Cassidy told them about an older girl at her school who bore a remarkable likeness to her, and with whom she felt a strong bond.

DNA tests proved that the girl was Morne and Celesta’s long lost daughter, who was living only a few kilometres away from their family.

In handing down the sentence, Mr Hlope said the kidnapper’s crime was premeditated and too serious not to warrant a jail term, South Africa’s News24 reported.

Zephany, who is now said be pregnant, was raised under a different name and has shunned the media spotlight on the case.

The teenager was sent to a place of safety after the kidnapper’s arrest. But she has opted to move back to the home in which she had lived and has not formed any bond with her biological family.

Her biological father, Morne Nurse, welcomed the sentence, saying he was looking forward to building a relationship with her daughter.

“It’s actually made me tired, it’s made me sick completely,” he said outside court.

“I couldn’t sleep for nights. I couldn’t even eat properly. So the way forward is to build my relationship with my daughter, and that’s it”.

During the trial, Zephany’s biological mother, Celeste Nurse wept as she described how at the age of 18 she woke up in the maternity ward to find her three-day-old baby had vanished from her cot.

The trial attracted a lot of media attention in South Africa, with members of both families sometimes trading insults outside court.

The kidnapper was on March 10 found guilty of kidnapping, fraud, and contravening the Children’s Act.

She had maintained in her testimony that she had not been at Groote Schuur Hospital on the day Nurse was kidnapped.

She testified that she had been given the baby by a woman who had been giving her fertility treatment after she had a miscarriage in 1997.

AFP