Student from Vietnam held for ditching dead baby

Police have arrested a Vietnamese teenager for abandoning the corpse of her newborn baby in a shopping bag at the entrance of the underground shopping center at the Uijeongbu subway station in Gyeonggi.

Uijeongbu police said Friday they arrested two 19-year-old Vietnamese nationals on Thursday, a mother and her friend, on charges of negligent homicide and abandoning a dead body. The two are currently under investigation.

According to police, the mother, who came to Korea to join a language program at a university in Uijeongbu last January, gave birth early Wednesday morning by herself in one of the university’s dormitory restrooms.

“When the baby was born,” the mother later confessed to police, “my health condition was so poor I was unable to breastfeed.”

The mother says she tried bottle feeding but the child died three hours later and she abandoned it later that same day at 8:30 p.m. with the help of her friend.

When the mother entered Korea in January on a six-month visa, she was already six months pregnant, but did not notify her parents of the fact.

“The reason I didn’t go to the hospital was because I was afraid of what would happen if the school or my parents found out I was pregnant,” she told police.

“I thought maybe someone would find the baby and carry out the funeral arrangements if I left it in a crowded place.”

After analyzing CCTV footage of the subway station and underground shopping center, police were able to identify the accomplice, a Vietnamese individual the same age as the mother, whom they later arrested.

BY JEON ICK-JIN [kim.sohee0905@joongang.co.kr]