Guardia Civil investigates newborn's body found in a freezer in Allariz, Spain

The discovery

The Guardia Civil is investigating the body of a newborn found inside a chest freezer in a storage room in a garage of a building in the centre of Allariz, a town in the province of Ourense in Galicia. According to La Región, which first reported the case, the body was found while the daughter of a woman who had recently died was going through her mother's belongings. Another report says a relative of the late owner of the storage room opened the freezer and raised the alarm. Early estimates cited by La Región place the baby at 32 to 34 weeks of gestation and say the infant breathed, so it was not a foetus. Those same early estimates say the death may have occurred more than two decades ago.

Investigation under seal

Agents of the Guardia Civil in Ourense have been working on the case since Monday, 2 November. Sources close to the investigation confirmed that it is open and under the secrecy of summary proceedings, so no further details have been released. The court in Ourense that oversees the case has ordered the investigation sealed, and La Región reports that the case file has already been sent to the courts. The body was transferred to the Instituto de Medicina Legal de Galicia (Imelga), where forensic experts are waiting for the necessary analyses before they can determine the circumstances of the death. Samples of DNA were taken from several people to identify the baby's biological parents, and those samples were sent to a laboratory in Madrid.

Open questions about how the baby died

Investigators have not yet established whether the newborn was born alive or dead. If the baby was born alive, the inquiry must establish whether the death was caused deliberately or resulted from neglect or a lack of care after birth. Preliminary inquiries do not rule out that the baby died elsewhere in the province and that the body was then moved inside the freezer from Ourense to Allariz. The autopsy and the definitive forensic analysis at Imelga are expected to provide more detail on the cause of death. Until those results are in, the reports do not name any suspect or identify the parents.

Legal limits and elapsed time

Under Spanish law, the statute of limitations for any crime against life is twenty years. If the baby died early in this century, as some estimates suggest, any offence that a person may have committed would already be fully time-barred. That limit applies to prosecution, so the investigation may still be needed to establish what happened, who the parents were and where the death occurred. The Guardia Civil has not released any information on how long the body had been in the freezer, which remains one of the questions the investigators are working to resolve.