Dead newborn found at abandoned apartment in northern Japan

Workers clearing an apparently vacated apartment in northern Japan found the body of a dead newborn baby among the former residents' belongings, police said Thursday.

The workers notified police in northern Sapporo late Wednesday afternoon after they discovered the infant's body wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag and stuffed into a portable ice chest, police official Takaaki Ando said.

The landlord had hired the workers to clear the apartment after several months had passed without any contact from the residents, Ando said.

Police are awaiting autopsy results to determine how the infant died, including whether it was stillborn, he said. The body, which appears to be female, was already showing signs of decomposition, he added.

Police are seeking the former residents to question them about the case, he said.

Japan has been roiled in recent weeks by a string of infant and child-abandonment cases that came amid an outbreak of violent crime.

Earlier this month, a couple in western Japan were arrested after their 1-year-old son's body was found wrapped in a plastic bag and dumped in a gutter. The baby died after his parents allegedly left him in the baggage hold of a motorbike while they gambled at a pachinko pinball parlor.

Last week, a newborn baby girl was found abandoned in the garbage pickup area at a Tokyo-area apartment building, media reports said. The infant was suffering from hypothermia and hospitalized, they said.

Japan's first anonymous drop box for unwanted babies, which opened May 10, also triggered a wave of anger and soul-searching after it was discovered that a preschooler _ and not an infant _ was left by his father on the service's first day.