A newborn was found buried in the premises of a house near Nedumangad of Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday. It was found that the infant was buried in a pit, near a well in the compound. The house belongs to a woman who works in a textile showroom. She was living in the house with her father and brother. The police said that she went missing in the morning and was later taken into custody.
The newborn was three days old. Some of the locals said that they suspected that the woman was pregnant but that she had denied it, saying she had a fibroid in her stomach. When her stomach appeared normal again, they informed the police, suspecting that she had harmed the baby.
The locals also conducted a search inside the house where they found blood on the floor. The woman has been estranged from her husband for the past five years.
The shame and accompanying scrutiny around having a baby outside a marriage have led to similar crimes in the past. In August last year, a woman was accused of killing her newborn in Kattappana of Idukki. The unmarried woman, who was an employee in a bank, gave birth at a private hostel. None of her family members, colleagues or hostel mates knew about the pregnancy. Her elder sister, who shared a room with her in the hostel, did not know of it either. When the woman went into labour, she asked her sister to get some medicines from outside. By the time the sister returned, she had delivered the baby. Though she claimed that it was a stillborn child, the postmortem report revealed that the baby had been killed.
Kerala has witnessed many crimes involving children in the recent past. In the same month as the Kattappana case, a one-month old baby's partially decomposed body was retrieved from Vembanad lake in Vaikom.
In September this year, a 40-day old baby died after her father threw her into a river. Unnikrishnan, 25, committed the crime over a quarrel with his wife.