17-year-old stabs own baby to death with scissors
Police in this city of 23,000 in southwestern Slovakia, were confronted with a horrifying case when they were notified on February 24 that a newborn baby boy had been found stabbed to death in a garbage can.
Police investigators found the baby two days after he was killed and determined that he had been murdered. The director of the Dunajská Streda regional police office, Alexander Papp, said that the baby had been killed by his mother, a 17-year-old Romany high school student.
The Romany confessed to police upon questioning that she killed her newborn son, which autopsies showed had been stabbed 35 times with scissors that pierced through every organ of the baby's body.
The scissors were still lodged in the baby's mouth when he was found in the garbage can on the street.
The 17-year-old girl also told police that she gave birth to the baby boy in her family's bathtub, and added that neither her parents nor her schoolmates knew about her pregnancy.
The prosecutor from the Dunajská Streda district charged the Romany woman with murder.
Since the 17-year-old is a minor, the prosecutor said, she will face a sentence of 1.5 to 4 years.
Flaming house engulfs woman's son
A woman's terrible screaming along with the frenzied barking of dogs, woke up the citizens of this village of 1,200 in eastern Slovakia on February 24. Sixty-year-old Mária Dundová was running on the snow-covered street, screaming the name of her neighbor and relative. She could not talk; she just screamed and cried. Her hair was burned, and she was horrified.
A few minutes later, she finally managed to tell the villagers that her son was in her house, which was now engulfed in flames. But it was too late. Police arriving on the scene found the woman's 37-year-old son burned to death in what was left of the scorched house. The lady, whose name has not been revealed, is still in the hospital, and is receiving psychological treatment in the aftermath of the fire, which the director of the Trebišov regional fire department, Jozef Artim, said was caused by the son's cigarette.
Czech hiker dies after being left on mountain
In a tragic ending to a hiking tour of forty Czech tourists in Slovakia's Veľká Fatra mountain range, A 35-year-old Czech tourist, Ľubomír Kvasnička, died from exhaustion and hypothermia on February 22 in this village of less than 1,000 in central Slovakia.
According to the mountain rescue service, Kvasnička was wearing only a thin wind breaker on the hike. Also, the regional investigative branch in Banská Bystrica is trying to find out why Kvasnička was abandoned. "Czech authorities will be questioning the tourists on our behalf, and they will brief us," said the press secreatary for the investigative branch.
The Czechs, participating in the twentieth annual Tour Across the Veľká Fatra Mountains, apparently left the exhausted Kvasnička in the mountains. Czech Health Minister Jan Strásky, who was among the hikers, said that the group met unusually strong winds in Krížna, making it impossible to move. But the report does not satisfy Slovak mountain rescue rs that the Czech tourists contributed to Kvasnička's death by leaving him in the mountains.
Compiled by Andrea Lörinczová from press reports
