Bail for woman in South African kidnap case

A South African woman who allegedly kidnapped a baby from a hospital and raised her for 17 years was released on bail yesterday in a sensational case in which authorities are struggling to protect the privacy of a girl who apparently had no idea of what had happened.

Magistrate Mark Engel said the accused woman is not a flight risk and has no previous convictions, but ordered her to stay away from the girl she raised. She was freed on $425 bail.

The woman cannot contact her husband either, with whom she raised the child, as he is now a witness in her trial, prosecution spokesman Eric Ntabazalila said.

“She must move house,” he said. The trial resumes on May 29.

The 50-year-old woman, who lives in Cape Town, was arrested last week after the biological parents of the girl, Zephany, who turns 18 next month, figured out her identity. The woman faces charges of kidnapping and pretending to be the child’s mother, police said.

The girl was reunited last week with her biological parents, Morne and Celeste Nurse. She had unknowingly befriended her younger biological sister after the two attended the same high school. Shocked by their resemblance, the nurses alerted police, who conducted DNA tests that proved she was the baby kidnapped from Groote Schuur hospital in 1997.

“My daughter is back and that’s it,” Morne Nurse, the girl’s biological father, said yesterday. “Look, she is broken and we will fix it.”

Zephany thanked the public for their support.

“Under the circumstances, I am doing fine,” she said in a statement read by her lawyer, Ann Skelton of the Centre for Child Law, a South African organisation that represents children.

Sources close to Zephany have said she does not want to testify against the woman whom she believed for so long was her mother.

She reportedly has said she wants a normal life with the love and care of both sets of parents — and to be able to complete her schooling and go to the final year dance.

In the statement read on her behalf, she said: “I want to say thank you to all the people who supported me through this.”

She was raised by the accused and her husband as an only child, living in the same area as her biological family.

“She was blessed, she had everything, she never missed out on anything,” said Judith Wasserfall, a friend of the alleged kidnapper.