Newborn baby dumped on Chinese road crushed by cars

BEIJING: A newborn baby left in the middle of a busy street in southeast China was run over by a number of cars before being discovered by shocked residents, state media said on Sunday.

The baby was wrapped in a red plastic bag and abandoned before dawn on Friday near a marketplace in Fuzhou city in coastal Fujian province, the Beijing News reported.

Workers at the market noticed the plastic bag as it was repeatedly squashed by passing vehicles but assumed it contained garbage, it said.

After about an hour, when the bag tore open and a tiny arm fell out, they realised the bag contained a baby, the paper said.

Authorities assumed the baby, whose sex was not given, had been left by its parents and police were taking DNA samples in the hope of tracing them, it said.

Doctors had not yet been able to conclude if the baby died before or after being dumped on the street.