A woman arrested for starving her infant to death four years ago is expected to receive a heavier punishment than expected, as police decided Friday to apply the murder charge to her instead of the fatal child abuse charge.
The woman, in her 20s, was put under emergency detention on June 30 on charges of neglecting her baby son and letting him starve to death by not feeding him for three days at her previous home in Daejeon, 139 kilometers south of Seoul, after giving birth in April 2019.
A court issued an arrest warrant for her two days later on charges including child abuse homicide.
But the woman changed her remarks later, confessing that she killed the infant at a riverside site near her home and abandoned his body in June 2019, according to the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency.
The police agency, transferring her case to the prosecution on the day, said the woman's main charge has been changed to murder, which can be punished much more severely than child abuse homicide.
About a week ago, the same police agency changed charges against another woman, who was arrested for killing her two newborn babies and storing their bodies in a home refrigerator, from infanticide to murder, amid growing social resentment over a large number of recent deaths of unregistered babies.
Source: Yonhap News Agency