Richard Cushworth and Mercedes Casanellas return to Texas with little Moses more than a year after hospital mix-up

A British man and his Salvadoran wife whose baby was swapped in hospital have been able to bring their son back home – more than a year after he was born.

Richard Cushworth and Mercedes Casanellas’s ordeal began nine months ago when a DNA test found the baby they had brought home to Texas from El Salvador was not related to them.

But although authorities in the Central American country were able to find their son, Moses, relatively quickly, it took months of bureaucracy and a lengthy legal battle to get him out of the country.

Moses has now spent his second night in his family home in Dallas, Texas, and charges against the doctor who treated Casanellas have been dropped, but she and her husband still want answers.

Cushworth told the Today programme on Radio 4 on Thursday: “The investigation is still ongoing. I really would love to see justice in this situation. I’d like to know what happened; how did this happen?”

When the swap was first discovered, Cushworth and Casanellas, who are Christian missionaries working in Latin America, feared that their son had been snatched for sale to child traffickers.

In May 2015, Casanellas was in El Salvador alone while her husband was away for a month, when doctors told her she needed an emergency caesarean five weeks before her due date.

“Immediately, when he was taken out of me he was just by me and I gave him a kiss and then they took him to the nursery, and that was the last time I saw him,” Casanellas said on Today.

Medics told Casanellas they were taking her child to the hospital nursery overnight and that they would bring him back the next morning. When a boy was returned the next afternoon, she realised it was not the same baby.

“I started to yell all the staff in the hospital and they all insisted and said no, this is your baby,” Casanellas said. “So I was like, okay, this is my baby.”

But her suspicions persisted and, four months later in Texas, Casanellas had a DNA test. It showed there was zero chance that she was the baby’s mother.

The couple returned to El Salvador to alert the authorities and search for their child. He was found quickly after DNA testing on the babies of other new mothers who had shared the ward with Casanellas.

She told local media at the time: “I have a beautiful baby at home. It’s not mine and maybe there’s another mother suffering the same as I am and perhaps I have her baby.”

The babies were swapped back 7 September 2015. But while Casanellas described that as the most difficult part of the process, Cushworth said the nine-month battle to get the legal papers allowing them to take their son home was toughest.

A key issue were footprints taken of both babies after their birth. Neither conclusively proved the identities of the children. After British diplomatic pressure, a Salvadoran judge accepted DNA evidence instead, which definitively proved who were the rightful parents of each child.

At the same time, charges were brought against Alejandro Guidos, the doctor who treated Casanellas. He was the one who told her she would need an emergency caesarean while her husband was away, and she claimed he had been unusually close to her during the pregnancy. The charges have since been dropped and authorities say the mix up was a genuine mistake.

Bernhard Garside, the British ambassador to El Salvador, helped the couple with their legal fight. He told Today: “The bureaucracy of the Salvadoran system often seemed to conspire against us, but with the help of a supreme court judge and some good, old-fashioned diplomacy we finally managed to get leverage and we got the result we wanted.”