AP A woman in South Africa has been found guilty of kidnapping a newborn nearly two decades ago from a hospital and raising the girl as her own, just a short distance from where her devastated real parents were living.
Zephany Nurse, now 18, was reunited last year with her biological parents, Morne and Celeste Nurse, after the couple's second daughter befriended a girl at school who looked remarkably like her.
After a police investigation and DNA tests, it turned out they were sisters and that the new friend was the Nurse's missing child. [...]
After she was found, the girl chose to continue using the name given to her by the kidnapper.[...]
Celeste Nurse was dozing in her hospital bed when three day-old Zephany was kidnapped by a woman disguised as a nurse back in 1997. [...]
The girl was not in court and is taking final exams to graduate from high school.
The much publicised reunion between the girl and her real parents has been tense, with South African media reporting infighting among the Nurse family.
The girl, struggling to adjust to her newfound family, has pleaded for her privacy, and in a statement appeared to give the woman who raised her the benefit of doubt.
"Don't you think for once that that is my mother? Whether it is true or not is not for you to toy with," she wrote, addressing journalists. "Take all the professionalism away and think how it would be if this was you and your family, and your reputation gets swept through the disgusting gutters of filth."
After her arrest, the court ruled that the kidnapper could not make contact with the girl.
Television images showed the man who raised the girl as his own weeping outside the courtroom. The defendant testified that her husband never knew that the child was not his.
The defendant, 51, had pleaded not guilty to all three charges. During the trial she testified that she adopted the child.
"I didn't know the baby was stolen," the woman testified, according to the African News Agency.
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