By: Moja Dolenjska
The investigative commission of the National Assembly, tasked with establishing and assessing the facts in cases of stolen children, today questioned a police officer from Maribor who has been working on these cases since 2019. He found no grounds to suspect child abduction. A civil servant from the Directorate for Administrative Internal Affairs also testified, explaining the duties they perform.
At the Maribor Police Directorate, Marko Vehovar, part of the team for violent and sexual crimes, investigated cases of allegedly stolen children from the Maribor hospital. He handled 36 cases of missing children and concluded them with a report submitted to the Specialised State Prosecutor’s Office (SDT). From his side, the cases are closed, although the pre-trial procedure is still ongoing, as certain data must be verified under prosecutorial guidance.
According to Vehovar, he found no grounds to suspect that any child had been stolen from the hospital during the investigation. He received answers to all questions. “The only thing that could not be determined was where the children were buried, because in Maribor, the Field of White Roses, where parents can bury their children, has only existed since 2002,” he explained, according to STA.
During the investigation, he seized various documents from the hospital, administrative units in Ptuj and Maribor, the social work centre, and conducted interviews with all the mothers, former and current heads of pathology, former midwives, and heads of perinatology. He also collaborated with the president of the Association of Lost Children of Slovenia.
Commission chair Alenka Jeraj (SDS) asked whether paraffin samples had been checked. Vehovar explained that none were available due to the 30-year retention period, but autopsy records were reviewed. When asked if he was familiar with the case of Petra Lorbek, he confirmed. “It involved a paraffin sample contaminated by faecal matter, which destroyed the samples,” he said.
They also checked records with municipal companies to determine burial locations. “They were classified as pathological waste and placed in unmarked graves, there is no way to identify who they were,” he explained.
The commission also heard testimony from Mojca Kraševec of the Ministry of the Interior, specifically the Directorate for Administrative Internal Affairs. She first heard of alleged stolen children from maternity hospitals between 1965 and 1991 in 2021, when a mother approached her with suspicions about a stolen child.
She went on to describe her work in the department for population registration and public documents. Her responsibilities include managing civil registry matters, issuing public documents, registering residents, and handling citizenship. She noted that the civil registry is the primary source of data, but it did not exist until 2005, everything was recorded manually before that.
As a result, she said, inconsistencies may have occurred in documentation, especially with names in birth records. “Births are recorded in the birth register, deaths in the death register, but burial locations were not entered into the registers, and even today, we do not record that information in the civil registry,” she explained.
She pointed out that previous legislation did not include provisions for permanent record retention. Now, registry books and files are kept for 100 years. Death certificates for children are likely held by the National Institute of Public Health, and since 1980, stillborn children have also been assigned a unique personal identification number, Kraševec added.