After legal proceedings that stretched out five years, the man who ran a Spanish clinic that performed hundreds of late abortions on pregnant British women will be going to jail.

A Spanish judge sentenced Carlos Morín to 18 months for performing illegal late-term abortions. Morín’s operation was first brought to the public’s attention by the Sunday Telegraph more than a decade ago.

Reporter Robert Mendick explained the background in a story that ran this weekend:

His clinic, Ginemedex in Barcelona, had been “fully recommended” by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the NHS-funded charity, to British women wanting late abortions without a medical reason. Two Sunday Telegraph journalists, posing as a couple, secretly filmed staff at the clinic admitting it offered abortions for women as late as 30 weeks pregnant. Under British law, abortions without medical justification must be carried out before 24 weeks of pregnancy. Under Spanish law at the time, the limit was 22 weeks. The Telegraph investigation discovered the BPAS, the leading provider of abortions in the UK, as a matter of “policy” was referring pregnant women to the Spanish clinic if they were beyond the UK’s 24-week legal cut-off. Ginemedex staff were caught on film and audio offering to abort the healthy 26-week-old foetus of an undercover reporter.

According to Mendick,

Judge José Antonio Rodríguez ruled Morín was the “sole true director and mastermind behind all of the activity that took place in his clinics,” therefore acquitting the other gynaecologists who carried out many of the abortions. Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter. Follow @LifeNewsHQ They were manipulated by Morín, who ensured that the paperwork appeared to be in order before each abortion took place, said the judge.

Pascual Javier Ramón, a psychiatrist at the clinic, received a similar 18-month sentence.

Morín insisted he was the victim of a witch hunt when he was initially acquitted in 2013. “Falsities were dressed up like truths,” he said at the time. “I was a scapegoat.”

However “

a retrial was ordered on appeal over concerns that crucial evidence supplied by one of the Telegraph reporters and a Danish film crew, which followed up with its own clandestine investigation, had been wrongly ruled inadmissible,” Mendick reported. “The guilty verdicts were returned earlier this month.”

A judge that investigated Morín accused the doctor of enjoying “enormous income levels” and a “high standard of living,” the Sunday Telegraph reported. “The clinic charged women on a sliding scale depending on the stage of pregnancy,” according to Mendick. “Women at 26 weeks were charged €3,200” [almost $4,300].

If all this weren’t awful enough, Mendick added

Reports of a raid on the clinic as long ago as 2007 claimed machines “to grind foetuses” were found hidden at the clinic and at another run by Morín. The machines were connected to drains.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.