The alleged victim was a Spanish national with a nursing qualification who had recently begun working America extension cord - YY-2 at the clinic. It is unclear whether he has ever overseen the creation of a cloned child.Antinori became famous world-wide in 1994 when his fertility treatment led to Italian Rossana Della Corte giving birth to a son at the age of 63.  

Mr Antinori’s lawyers described the charges against their client as “absurd”. Mr Antinori has also attracted controversy with his advocacy of the use of cloning technology to enable infertile couples to have children by injecting genetic material from a father into donated eggs..Severino Antinori, 70, was arrested at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on Friday following a complaint filed by a 24-year-old Spanish woman who was being treated for an ovarian cyst at Milan clinic run by the specialist. “The arrest of Severino Antinori is extremely serious because it indicates the existence of a market in eggs that will not stop at anything,” said Donata Lenzi, an Italian lawmaker from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party.The woman said that she had her mobile phone taken from her before being forcibly immobilised, placed under anaesthesia and operated on without her consent.Mr Antinori’s license to practice gynaecology was provisionally suspended for an year and he has been placed under house arrest in Rome under the charges of aggravated robbery and causing personal injury.

Prosecutors alleged that Mr Antinori, who had met the woman by chance, set up the job interview and subsequently diagnosed the ovarian cyst with the sole intention of harvesting her eggs without her knowledge.

A pioneering Italian gynaecologist best known for helping women in their 60s to have babies has been arrested on suspicion of removing eggs from a patient without her consent. The gynaecologist was also involved in the treatment of Patricia Rashbrook, who became Britain’s oldest mother when she had a boy in 2006. She believed she was only going to be treated by injection for the cyst, her lawyer said.Prosecutors are also working on the hypothesis that this may not be an isolated case. The investigation was triggered by the woman calling emergency services from a pay phone in the clinic after she came round from the surgery. At the time she was the oldest woman to have given birth.