CAPE TOWN: A South African woman was convicted Thursday of kidnapping a newborn baby and raising her for 17 years before an astonishing coincidence reunited the girl with her biological family.

“You must have been the person who removed the child from hospital,” High Court judge John Hlophe told the woman, who claimed to have been handed the baby at a train station after entering into a private “adoption” program.

“Your story, if anything, is a fairy tale and the court rejects it with the contempt it deserves.”

The 50-year-old kidnapper, who cannot be named to protect the new identity of the girl she stole, remained grim-faced, staring at the judge.

The girl’s biological mother, Celeste Nurse, 36, sobbed loudly as the guilty verdict was handed down while chants of “Yes! Yes!” were heard from the public gallery.

The kidnapper was denied bail and taken into custody ahead of sentencing on May 30. Onlookers clapped as she was taken down to the cells.

She was also convicted of fraud and offenses under the country’s Children’s Act for registering the girl as her biological child.

The judge said she could face a sentence of up to 10 years in jail.

The girl’s real identity came to light in February last year, when her younger biological sister began attending high school and pupils pointed out her remarkable likeness to a final-year student.

The younger girl told her parents, who met the older girl and immediately believed she was their long-lost baby. They called the police, and DNA tests confirmed that the girl was indeed their child, whom they had named Zephany Joy Nurse.

Without knowing it, the Nurse family had been living within a couple of kilometers of their kidnapped daughter, while celebrating her birthday every year and never giving up hope of finding her.

During the trial, Celeste Nurse wept as she described how at the age of 18 she woke up in the maternity ward of a Cape Town hospital to find her three-day-old baby had vanished from her cot on March 30, 1997.

Witnesses said they had seen an unknown woman in a nurse’s uniform at the hospital around the time and one of them picked out the accused at an identity parade.

Ahead of the verdict her husband told reporters that “we were like father and daughter and family together. I never knew it wasn’t my daughter.”

The kidnapper told the court during the trial that after a miscarriage in December 1996 she paid a woman who promised to find her a child to adopt.

The woman said she had not told her husband of her miscarriage, so presented the baby to him as their own child.