Lizard found eating abandoned newborn horrifies Thailand: ‘sick to my stomach’

Horrified residents near Bangkok found a monitor lizard eating a newborn’s remains. Police are trying to find the mother to determine if the baby was alive

Police in Thailand are searching for the mother of a newborn baby whose body was partially eaten by a monitor lizard to determine if the infant was still alive when it was abandoned, in a case which has caused horror and outrage across the country.

Local media reported that around noon on Tuesday, frightened residents of Samut Prakan, located roughly 25km (16 miles) south of Bangkok, witnessed the reptile devouring the remains of a baby and promptly contacted police.

Kittisak Phongphipat, one of the first to witness the incident, told the Thai Examiner news website that he initially mistook the baby for something else.

“I thought it was a fish washed up from the rain,” he said.

“Then I looked closer. It was a baby. I felt sick to my stomach because the baby had been torn to pieces by the animal.”

When police and rescue volunteer group Nakon45 arrived, they found the 2-metre (6.5-foot) reptile still gripping the lifeless body in its jaws. By then, the infant’s head had already been detached from its body and was lying on the road.

Rescuers attempted to recover the lower part of the child’s body, but the lizard took it and concealed it under a house nearby.

“The body was very small,” one of the rescuers, Thanathorn Saelim, told KhaoSod newspaper. “We couldn’t even determine its gender.”

Since there was no noticeable smell, he believed the body was not decomposed.

The body was sent for autopsy, where staff concluded that it might have been there for more than two days. They plan to perform DNA tests to identify the mother and will also try to establish whether the baby, thought to be full-term, was stillborn or left alive.

This is a criminal act. If the baby was born alive and abandoned, there will be serious chargesPreecha Damrongwong, Bang Kaew police chief

Colonel Preecha Damrongwong, superintendent of Bang Kaew police station, told the Thai Examiner that the investigation team’s priority was locating the person who abandoned the child.

“This is a criminal act,” he said. “If the baby was born alive and abandoned, there will be serious charges.”

Investigators speculate that the baby’s mother might have abandoned it because she could not care for it, the Bangkok Post newspaper reported.

Given the area’s concentration of rented homes occupied mainly by migrant workers, police are exploring the possibility that the mother may be an undocumented migrant.

Residents were shocked when news of the incident spread. Supansa Rattanachai told the Thai Examiner that she couldn’t sleep after hearing what had happened. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” the 43-year-old food vendor said. “Even if the baby died, how could anyone leave it out like that?”

A wildlife expert said it was unlikely that the baby was still alive.

“Monitor lizards will scavenge [for] meat if hungry,” Anucha Thavorn, a wildlife biologist at Kasetsart University, told the Thai Examiner. “This lizard was not hunting. It was feeding on something already dead or still.”