Parents accused of abandoning their young daughter in Spain in the hopes she would be taken in by the system have been arrested.
The pair of foreign nationals are accused of leaving the youngster on a bus travelling from Granada in Andalucia to Bilbao, in the Basque Country.
Police say the practice is becoming increasingly common among families attempting to secure state protection for their children.
The couple were detained at Bilbao’s Loiu Airport in November by officers from the Provincial Immigration and Borders Brigade, shortly before they were due to board a flight out of the country.
According to investigators, the case dates back to February, when the parents travelled to Spain with their underage daughter and left her alone on an intercity bus travelling from Granada to Bilbao.
The girl was sent on the journey entirely unsupervised, supposedly to meet her adult brother living in the northern city.
Officers later discovered that he, too, had been abandoned by the same parents years earlier, also as a minor, and also in Spain.
After reaching Bilbao with no adult guardian, the girl headed directly to Social Services. Staff activated emergency child-protection protocols, placing her first in temporary accommodation and later in a long-term residential care centre run by the Basque authorities.
Months later, at the end of November, police received a new alert from the regional residential care unit to say that the parents had unexpectedly turned up at the child’s centre.
Investigators quickly established that the pair intended to leave Spain immediately afterwards and had booked return flights to their home country – which has not been revealed.
Officers intercepted them at the airport and placed them under arrest on suspicion of child abandonment.
Following the compilation of the police report, the couple were brought before a judge and the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office. They were released with charges, and the court authorised that their daughter be handed back into their care pending further legal proceedings.
In recent years, authorities have detected an increasing number of foreign parents deliberately leaving their children in Spain so that the minors enter the child-protection system and receive state care.
Officers warn that the deliberate abandonment of foreign children places them in situations of extreme vulnerability.
They stress that close coordination between specialist police units and Social Services is essential to respond to what they describe as an emerging pattern of exploitation of Spain’s protection network.
