Woman demands £2.5m after discovering she was given to wrong parents as a baby

7 September 2021, 22:10 | Updated: 7 September 2021, 22:17

A teenage woman is demanding £2.5 million after discovering she was given to the wrong parents after her birth - two decades later.

The mistake was only discovered by chance, when a DNA test revealed she was not related to the people she spent her life believing were her parents.

It has emerged that, as a newborn infant in Spain, she was accidentally switched with another baby girl in the maternity ward.

Sara Alba, the health chief of Spain's La Rioja region, said: "It was a human error and we haven't been able to find out who was to blame.

"The systems back then were different and weren't as computerised as they are now."

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The babies were mixed up after being born five hours apart at a hospital in La Rioja in 2002.

They were both put in incubators, having been born underweight, and at some point they were given accidentally handed to the other's parents instead of being returned to their own.

Now, the 19-year-old woman, who has not been named, has demanded compensation of three million euros, or £2.5 million, from local health authorities.

The other woman in the switch, who was not named, had been informed about what happened, according to La Rioja, the local newspaper which reported on the mistake on Tuesday.

Ms Alba said the incident could not happen again.