Taoyuan police on Wednesday arrested a 30-year-old Indonesian woman, Titik Suryani, who is suspected of disposing of the body of her newborn in a community garbage dump in Taipei.
The body was discovered by a pig farmer in Taoyuan, surnamed Wu, in one of his kitchen refuse recycling barrels on Tuesday when he was preparing to feed his pigs.
Wu said the batch of barrels containing the baby came from a recycling company in New Taipei City and a steak restaurant in Taipei that he has collaborated with for many years.
He said the recycling trucks had carried eight barrels of kitchen refuse back from the two cities, so he was not sure where they had picked up the one containing the body.
Officers at Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) police station said that after reviewing surveillance footage from the areas the recycling trucks had passed through and checking 950 pickup locations, they isolated a community on Taipei’s Zhongshan North Road Sec. 2.
Police said that Suryani had apparently given birth in the restroom of her employer’s house on Friday last week and disposed of the baby — whom Suryani alleged was stillborn — at about 5:49am on Tuesday.
They said that Suryani arrived in Taiwan in February, ran away after a week and later found work with her current employer.
When she found out she was pregnant, she said she did not dare see a doctor because she is a runaway worker.
Police said that Suryani first denied disposing of the body in a garbage dump, but admitted to doing so when she was taken to the Yangmei police station.
They quoted Suryani as saying she did not know her actions went against the law, alleging that it was customary in Indonesia for women to dispose of stillborn children themselves.
If the infant was abandoned while it was still alive, the mother could be prosecuted for manslaughter by abandonment, police said.
Yangmei police station said it has concluded its questioning and forwarded the case to the Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office.
An autopsy of the body has been scheduled, it said.
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