A man walking across a Philippi East field has found a baby - naked, pale and with its umbilical chord still attached.
|||Cape Town - On Tuesday, the Daily Voice was called out to a Philippi East field for a third time to find the corpse of a tiny newborn on the ground.
In the latest discovery, a man came across a baby - naked, pale and with its umbilical chord attached.
The grim find comes as the country observes Child Protection Week.
“This is now a graveyard for unwanted newborns,” community leader Yvonne Barthies told the Daily Voice.
“It is a baby dumping ground – in three years three babies that we know of were dumped here. This is not good for our people in this community. We are not murderers here.”
The concerned woman says residents suspect a woman dumped the child on the open field in the early hours of Tuesday morning under cover of darkness.
“We suspect the mother of this baby came from another area to dump it here,” said Barthies.
“There is no electricity here so this place is very dark at night, and that is the only reason why people take advantage of it.
“We are like aliens here for five years – until election time. Only then the politicians act like we are people.”
Police spokesman FC van Wyk confirmed the infant was found early on Tuesday.
“We are investigating a case of concealment of birth. No arrests have been made,” he said.
Heavily pregnant resident Lameez Crawley, 27, said that they are themselves hunting for any woman who was recently pregnant and who is now without her baby.
“That will be a bit difficult considering there are a lot of us in this area,” said Lameez.
She was one of the first people on the scene.
Witnesses told the Daily Voice that a man crossing the field at the Klipfontein Mission Station along Govan Mbeki Road came across the little corpse.
“He said initially he thought the baby was a doll, and actually got a shock when he found it was a dead baby,” said Lameez.
“I think the baby was in a bag which was next to it. But the man saw the bag and wanted to see the contents and that is when he made the gruesome discovery.
“I rushed there and I saw it was, in fact, a baby – it still had the umbilical cord attached. We had to chase dogs away from the corpse and covered it with the plastic bag.”
Lameez said the baby was pale and its clenched little hands had already turned blue.
“She probably died because of the cold. It was raining last night,” said Lameez.
“And I cannot imagine how the baby must have cried as the mother walked away from her.”
The Daily Voice was previously called out to the field in October 2011 when a three-month-old was found stuffed into a red sports bag.
Exactly a year earlier in 2010, another infant was found by a municipal worker in a plastic bag on the same field.
Daily Voice