Montserrat Roca, neighbor of Vila rodona, has asked Investigating Court 3 of Tarragona for the reopening of her stolen baby case, archived years ago, after incorporating new documentation about the Cemetery of Tarragona which, in the opinion of her defense, questions the version that supported the closing of the case.
The complaint focuses on alleged crimes of illegal detentions, assumption of childbirth, alteration of paternity, and falsification of public document. Roca reported the facts in 2014 and, two years later, the procedure was archived after the investigations carried out by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Tarragona and the Civil Guard.
A file supported by a burial hypothesis
The provisional dismissal issued by the court stated that, despite anomalies being detected, the most probable hypothesis was that the newborn had died on September 1, 1976, and that he was buried on the 5th of that same month and year in an unspecified common grave of the Tarragona Cemetery.
In that same judicial resolution, it was recorded that the proceedings requested by the appellant were not going to entail, in principle, a significant advance in the clarification of the facts, given the lack of sufficient evidentiary basis to agree to them.
The case of Roca is framed within a score of complaints filed in Tarragona for alleged stolen babies. All ended up archived, in many cases due to the complexity of the investigations, although irregularities were detected in several files.
The cemetery books reopen the controversy
The affected party began to mobilize 15 years ago, when similar processes were uncovered in different parts of Spain. The most recent turn came in 2025, when the Observatorio de las Desapariciones Forzadas de Menores accessed the cemetery's entry books.
From that review it follows, always according to the defense, that between August 5 and November 2, 1976, no entry of any fetus in the cemetery is recorded, nor on September 5, 1976, the date on which the file was based.
"We have taken 12 years to access documentation to prove that what was accredited then is incorrect" - Sílvia Climent, lawyer
The lawyer maintains that, contrary to what was deemed proven at the time, there is no record that allows affirming that the fetus was buried on that September 5. Therefore, she considers that the procedure should not have been archived without first performing the test she now demands.
"It is a falsehood or an error of the first certificate. We have gone to see the books, and it is something that the court did not do" - Sílvia Climent, lawyer
The new proceedings that the defense claims
In the brief presented in April 2025, the defense requests several actions. Among them, identify the midwife from Joan XXIII who assisted Roca during childbirth and clarify why her signature or review does not appear in the official documents.
It also requests the birth registry book in which the complainant appears and what happened with her child, with the aim of ruling out that a substitution could have occurred or a delivery to a person other than the mother. To that it adds the request for the death registry book communicated to the court, to clarify the lack of documentation in the Abortion File of the Civil Registry, the identity of the certifying doctor and the real cause of death.
The defense also proposes to verify if, in case any fetus has died, it is really that of the complainant and not of another. The line of argument is based on several inconsistencies which, according to Climent, remain without documentary explanation.
"First of all, the fetus was put on artificial feeding despite the fact that it was allegedly stillborn" - Sílvia Climent, lawyer
The lawyer adds that there is also no record of entry in the cemetery and that in the Joan XXIII morgue neither entry nor exit is recorded. From there, she maintains that there is a missing fetus, whether alive or dead, whose traceability someone must prove.
The case, one year later, without movements
The lawyer Jordi Prat assures that the family has gathered documents that, in his understanding, allow to clearly prove the abduction of the newborn. He also denounces the lack of progress since the reopening was promoted again.
"We are not against anyone, we only want to know the truth" - Jordi Prat, lawyer of Roca
Prat regrets that, after a year, no judicial movement has occurred and that the weight of the investigation continues to fall, in practice, on the victims. Along the same lines, the defense criticizes that it is the affected party herself who has had to sustain for more than a decade the search for documents to dispute a resolution that approved a burial that now does not appear in the consulted records.
The petition for reopening once again places at the center a case dated September 1976, when the order maintained that the newborn died on day 1 and was buried on day 5 in the Tarragona Cemetery. Almost half a century later, the judicial discussion revolves precisely around that, if that burial really existed or if the absence of documentary trace forces a review of an archive that seemed definitive.