Dead baby left at shop counter
2005-11-15 23:30
Buks Viljoen
Nelspruit - Police in the Mpumalanga capital will study security videotapes from a Nelspruit shop to solve the riddle of a dead baby found in a sports bag at the shop's parcels counter.
Inspector Dawie Pretorius said the naked corpse of a baby boy was wrapped in newspaper and in a plastic bag inside the sports bag.
It is believed the bag with its gruesome contents was handed in on the morning of Monday, November 7.
After closing time that night, people noticed the bag
was still on the shelf, but no one suspected that anything was
amiss.
Pretorius said the management thought a client had forgotten the bag there.
By Thursday morning, there was a bad smell in the shop. A security guard took the black bag from the shelf and saw blood dripping from it.
They found the corpse inside the bag. A post-mortem done on Tuesday showed that the baby, about seven months old, had suffocated.
It seems the baby was dead by the time the bag was handed in at the shop.
- Beeld