Police said Tuesday that they have arrested a woman in connection with the death of her newborn baby, the latest in a series of infanticides that have rocked South Korea.
The woman in her 40s is accused of throwing her newborn daughter out of a second-floor motel window soon after giving birth in Bucheon, just west of Seoul, last Wednesday.
The police launched an investigation into the case after a resident who lives near the motel found the dead body wrapped in bed sheets inside a paper bag and reported it to the police Monday.
The woman was put under emergency detention after police found her on a nearby street and detained her.
The suspect reportedly told the police that she gave birth to the baby Wednesday and "threw her out the window after ripping off the screens," adding she thought someone would take good care of her if they found her.
She said that she does not know who the baby's father is, whom she met while drinking, officials said.
The police plan to request an arrest warrant for the suspect and conduct an autopsy of the baby to determine the exact cause of her death.
In July, the National Assembly passed a bill to toughen the punishment, up to the death penalty, for the killing of newborn babies and related cases of body abandonment following public outrage over the recent deaths of unregistered infants.
The Board of Audit and Inspection found that some 2,000 babies born in the country between 2015 and 2022 were undocumented after birth.
Among the cases, a baby who was born in 2022 was later discovered to have died from malnutrition in the southern city of Changwon.
In June, the police arrested a mother for allegedly strangling her two unregistered babies to death shortly after their births in 2018 and 2019, respectively, and keeping their bodies in a refrigerator in her apartment in Suwon, 30 kilometers south of Seoul.
Source: Yonhap News Agency