Parents arrested for murder of five-day-old son in South Korea

South Korean government launches investigation into more than 2,000 undocumented babies born since 2015

Investigators in South Korea have detained the parents after a newborn’s corpse was found buried in September 2022 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A South Korean couple have been arrested for allegedly strangling their five-day-old baby to death and burying the body in the southern city of Geoje.

A man in his 20s his partner in her 30s were charged with the murder of their son, whose body is yet to be found in mountains near their home in Geoje, located 331km south of the capital Seoul.

The baby was born in September 2022 and reportedly discharged from the hospital four days later.

It is the latest case in a series involving alleged child abuse or infanticide that were uncovered after the government launched an investigation to check on the wellbeing of more than 2,000 babies who had gone undocumented since being born after 2015. Two unregistered newborns were found in a refrigerator in their home last month.

Police said the Geoje couple initially claimed that they found the baby dead on the morning of 9 September, the day after he was discharged from hospital, and that they buried the body themselves on a mountain as they couldn't pay for cremation.

But the duo later told authorities that they feared their parents would separate them if they were aware of the pregnancy.

The father strangled the baby while the mother watched, officials said, according to Yonhap news agency.

The Goseong county government found that the couple had not registered their child's birth and reported the child's disappearance last Thursday.

Authorities dispatched around 80 staff members, including riot police, to comb the area around the mountain, but were unable to find the newborn's corpse.

The police are focusing their search on a location given by the couple.

In a separate incident, a woman has been accused of killing two of her newborns and keeping their bodies in her freezer for years.

An official with the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police said the woman, in her 30s, admitted to killing the babies as she faced financial difficulties in caring for her three other children, aged eight, 10 and 12.

The newborns were only a day old when they died, the official told CNN.

The woman is suspected to have strangled her newborns soon after giving birth in a hospital in November 2018 and 2019.

The woman reportedly told her husband she had aborted the foetuses. In 2019, a South Korean court ruled against the criminalising of abortion, which led to abortions being legalised from 2021.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Suwon District Court had also planned to hold a hearing on an arrest warrant for a woman accused of starving her infant to death in 2019.

The woman, in her 20s, was put under emergency detention on Friday on charges of neglecting her baby son and letting him starve to death by not feeding him for three days at her previous home in Daejeon after giving birth in April 2019.