A newborn baby died in Paris on Monday after his 18-year-old American mother threw him out a hotel window with the umbilical cord still connected, French prosecutors and a police source said.
According to the prosecutor’s office, she hurled the infant from a second-floor window of a hotel in eastern Paris’s 20th arrondissement.
“The newborn was given emergency care but did not survive,” prosecutors stated.
A police source informed AFP that the baby died at the Robert Debre hospital at 7:45 a.m. (0645 GMT).
A cloth-wrapped newborn with its umbilical cord still connected was found in front of the hotel, prompting a police response, the police source said.
According to the source, the mother, an 18-year-old American student, had given birth in a room on the hotel’s second floor before throwing her infant out the window.
French officials hinted that a murder investigation had been initiated and that the young woman, who was “part of a group of young adults travelling in Europe,” had been arrested.
The mother was sent to a hospital for treatment after giving birth, the prosecutor’s office reported.
Paris Match said that the child’s mother was on a study trip to Paris with other American students.