PJ police had launched a search for the 23-year-old woman when she went missing after discarding the newborn’s dead body, wrapped in a blanket, near Santarém’s Urban Ring road on Saturday.
The missing woman’s aunt told the media the baby had been born four days earlier in the basement of an abandoned house on a main avenue in Santarém.
She claimed the baby was the fruit of an extramarital affair that her niece had been trying to hide from her husband.
On Tuesday the PJ police issued a statement in which it said they had “identified and detained a 23-year-old woman, on suspicion of the crimes of murder and desecration of a body.”
“The facts occurred at the beginning of last week, in the municipality of Santarém, and the investigation established that the arrested woman, after giving birth, caused the death of the newborn child and left the body in a secluded place.”
Newspaper Correio da Manhã (CM) reported that an autopsy has shown that the newborn was suffocated with a plastic bag shortly after birth, and a friend of the mother is also said to be under investigation for alleged collaboration.
In related news a mother from São Miguel, in the Azores, killed herself and her baby on Monday following a bitter custody battle with the child’s father.
She is said to have sat in the back of her car with the three-year-old boy on her lap, before dousing them and the vehicle with petrol and setting it alight.
According to CM, just hours earlier, a court had authorised the baby’s father, the woman’s ex-husband, to be able to see the child every two weeks.
The newspaper states the car was completely destroyed in the blaze and only after the fire was put out were the bodies found.