Police searching for the mother of a three-year-old girl whose father allegedly abandoned her at a train station in Australia at the weekend found a woman's body locked in the boot of a car at the family's home in New Zealand today.
The woman's body was not immediately identified, but the car was registered to the father of the toddler and the investigation into the whereabouts of the child's mother had now been upgraded from a missing person investigation to possible murder, said Detective Senior Sergeant Simon Scott.
Police in Australia, New Zealand and the United States, as well as Interpol, are looking for Xue Naiyin, a 54-year-old Chinese-language magazine publisher who aroused suspicion when authorities found his daughter, Qian Xun Xue, alone at a station in the southern Australian city of Melbourne on Saturday.
Security video showed a man, believed by police to be Xue, accompanying the girl in the station then leaving her by an escalator.
He boarded a flight to Los Angeles soon afterward, police said. Father and daughter had travelled together to Melbourne from New Zealand last Thursday, and police said they held grave concerns for the girl's mother, Anan Liu, because she had not come forward after news broke that she had been abandoned.
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