An abandoned baby girl, thought to be four months old, was discovered in a plastic garbage bag by a stray dog in Lebanon early Wednesday morning.
A bystander outside a government building heard cries from within the sack as the dog carried it in its jaws. According to The National, the new-born was carried to the Islamic Hospital in Tripoli, a city in northern Lebanon, before being transferred to the Tripoli Government Hospital on Wednesday.
Tripoli is the main city in northern Lebanon, located 81 kilometres north of Beirut and facing the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Temperatures this time of year average 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), making it dangerous for an infant to be left outside.
Tripoli is the second-largest city in a country where around 80% of the population is impoverished due to an economic crisis that began in 2019.
The baby's face and torso are covered in bruises and scratches in photos.
After photographs of the new-born were uploaded on Twitter, social media users were quick to denounce the kid's abandonment.
According to Ghassan Rifi, a Lebanese journalist, officials have not yet determined who abandoned the kid.
“It was not known whether the ‘wild lady’ who threw the child and fled to an unknown destination had intended to throw her in the area so that the dogs would finish her off and eat her corpse or to draw attention to her,” he wrote.
The infant is said to be doing well at the hospital.
Several such cases of child abuse have been reported in Lebanon in recent weeks, according to news reports. Lynn Talib, a 6-year-old girl, died earlier this month in the northern region of Miniyeh. Prior to her death, she had been sexually abused, according to medical forensic investigations.
A nursery staffer was detained last week, and the facility was permanently shuttered, after footage of the woman allegedly assaulting new-borns surfaced.
Given the financial challenges faced by state-owned institutions, experts believe it is hard to tell whether incidences of child abuse are on the rise owing to the lack of a centralized mechanism for tracking statistics.
However, as the country's financial situation worsens, incidences of child dumping, and abuse have grown.
