Taipei, Feb. 28 (CNA) A couple from Singapore have been identified by police as persons of interest in a case in which the body of a newborn baby girl was found wrapped in a plastic bag in a kitchen waste bucket carried by a garbage truck from Taipei to Xindian in New Taipei early Tuesday, Xindian police said Thursday.

The body was discovered when an employee at a recycling company opened the plastic bag to recycle garbage collected from across Taipei in the early hours of Tuesday.

The employee immediately reported the incident to Xindian police who believe the baby girl, found with the umbilical cord and placenta intact, was disposed of shortly after her birth.

After reviewing street camera footage along the route of the garbage truck, police concluded that the baby was likely disposed of in Ximending (西門町) in central Taipei.

A man allegedly wrapped the baby in a black plastic bag and threw the bag into a container full of kitchen waste at around 3:00 a.m. Tuesday, police said.

As police traced the suspect from video footage in Ximending, members of the public claimed to have seen the man and reported that he spoke Mandarin with a foreign accent, police said.

Xindian police said they visited a hotel in the area popular with visitors from Southeast Asia and identified a man who resembles the suspect, but he had already checked out.

Police determined that the man, in his 20s, checked into a hotel in Wanhua (萬華) District in Taipei with a woman and that they left Tuesday afternoon.

Police swabbed bloodstains and collected other evidence from the room where the couple stayed in order to determine whether they are related to the death of the baby girl.

An initial investigation suggests the man and woman are from Singapore and left Taiwan later Tuesday.

The Criminal Investigation Bureau is trying to contact its Singaporean counterpart and seek its assistance in identifying and questioning the couple.

(By Huang Hsu-sheng and Flor Wang)
Enditem/AW