Student nurse accused of attempting to kidnap a newborn baby ‘who could pass for hers after a fake pregnancy’ tells jurors she suffered a miscarriage weeks earlier

A student nurse accused of attempting to kidnap a newborn baby told jurors today she had suffered a miscarriage weeks earlier.

Safia Ahmadei, 36, allegedly wanted a child ‘who could pass for her own after faking a pregnancy’, and had repeatedly entered the neonatal ward at the hospital where she was on placement to ‘scout’ for a baby.

But Ahmadei told jurors she had ‘lied’ to her husband that she had given birth to twin boys out of fear he would leave her if he knew the truth.

Ahmadei sobbed on the witness stand this afternoon as she told of a chequered relationship history involving an unhappy first marriage before she became the second wife of another man whose wife had been unable to conceive.

The court heard she ‘took vows’ with him in an Islamic Nikah marriage ceremony in order to sleep with him for the purpose of ‘conceiving a child for them’.

Safia Ahmadei wanted a child ‘who could pass for her own after faking a pregnancy’, and was becoming ‘increasingly desperate’ after telling her husband she had given birth to twins weeks earlier, jurors were told. Pictured: Wolverhampton Crown Court 

But by the end of January this year the man – who lived with his wife in the same block of flats but would visit Ahmadei regularly – was expecting her to soon give birth to the twin boys she told him she was pregnant with.

Ahmadei told jurors she had miscarried at the end of a nightshift at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, earlier that month, but had been too ‘scared’ to tell the husband because he had been left ‘sad and broken’ when she suffered another miscarriage early last year.

As a result, when he asked her if she had given birth, she told him she had, but that one of the twins had died and the other was in a ‘poor condition’ in the hospital.

Prosecutor Seamran Sidhu had previously told Wolverhampton Crown Court that by the time the trainee nurse was arrested after repeatedly entering the neonatal ward in mid-February, she had become ‘increasingly desperate’ and ‘needed to produce a baby’.

But Ahmadei told jurors she could not tell her husband that both babies died at the same time ‘because it would be too much to take’.

‘In my mind, I thought after a few days I would tell him that the second baby had died’, she added.

She continued: ‘I lied to him, I was just thinking how to get out of the situation.

‘He told him I had given birth because I was scared that if I told him I had a miscarriage I would become angry and leave me.’

The court heard that Ahmadei went to hospital last November claiming she was pregnant and suffering bleeding, but when staff did a pregnancy test it was negative. 

Jurors were also told she did not tell police she had suffered a miscarriage when she was interviewed.

She told the jury: ‘In Afghanistan, in our community it is not good to be separated from a husband and get married to another person. 

‘That’s why I didn’t give information about (the husband) or my life with him.’

Jurors have been told Ahmadei took a ‘particular interest’ in a premature baby girl after befriending her mother and quizzing the woman on their ‘racial heritage’ while on the maternity ward.

But Ahmadei, who had two children from an earlier marriage and was ‘Islamically but not legally’ divorced from the husband, denied intending to kidnap the baby girl. 

She said she had returned with blankets because the infant’s mother had complained about the air conditioning system making her baby cold.

She said the pair had chatted and the mother had told her she didn’t have a sister in the local area, so Ahmadei said that she offered to be her ‘sister’ and invited her to her home once the woman was discharged.

Asked by her barrister Kevin Metzger what would have happened if she had taken a baby girl home to her husband, she said: ‘He would not accept (her) because he’s thinking that he had a baby boy. In our culture, they value a lot a baby boy’.

Ahmadei, of Wolverhampton, denies one count of attempting to kidnap between February 12 and 14.

The case continues.