Plzen, West Bohemia, July 26 (CTK) – The Czech police have accused a mother of murder after her newborn boy, who was found in a baby hatch in Plzen on Sunday, died on Monday, police spokeswoman Marketa Fialova said today.
The 30-year-old woman faces an exceptional sentence, which ranges from 20 to 30 years, or even life imprisonment if found guilty.
Doctors found out that the boy had serious injuries that must have been caused by another person and not during the childbirth, Fialova said.
The baby boy was found in the hatch in Plzen’s health centre in a critical condition on Sunday morning. He had bruises all over the body, according to previous information.
This is why the police started investigating what happened around the baby hatch and they tracked down the boy’s mother. They accused her of murder after he died.
According to detectives, the woman kept her pregnancy secret and gave birth to the boy in a bathroom at home.
“Immediately after the birth she attempted to kill the boy, using gross violence. However, her mother, who had no idea about the daughter’s pregnancy until then, disturbed her in the bathroom,” Fialova said.
The daughter then asked the mother to take the newborn baby to the baby hatch.
Two newborn boys were put into the baby hatch in the centre of Plzen separately within a three-hour period on Sunday. The other baby is in a good condition. The first baby was found wrapped in a bathrobe, the other in remnants of a greyish jumper.
A baby hatch is an incubator in which a woman may anonymously leave her unwanted newborn baby without threatening the baby’s life or health. Health care personnel in the respective hospital receives a signal from a “full” box and can look after the baby immediately.
The first baby hatch in the Czech Republic was installed in Prague in 2005. So far 70 hatches have been opened all over the country and 156 newborn babies have been found in them, including the two boys in Plzen.
Critics say the baby hatches run counter to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child that guarantees children’s right to know their name, identity, nationality and who their parents are.
