Baby girl ‘cremated’ at back of house

A HUSBAND and wife were up to last night assisting police in their investigation into an alleged “cremation” of the couple’s 18-month-old baby girl at the back of their home at Salazar Trace, Point Fortin. Last Friday  morning, neighbours alerted police after observing that for the past week, one of the couple’s four children had been missing. A party of policemen headed by Cpl Jimmy Phalloo, swooped down on the makeshift wooden shack at TPD Road and after interviewing relatives of the children, discovered bones and ashes on a sheet of galvanise below which were burnt wood and the charred remains of a tyre. Police also found pieces of bones and ashes from the bank of a river which runs at the back of the couple’s home.
  
The couple, ages 69 and 36, were arrested and were in police custody up to yesterday. Police also took away the couple’s three other children, ages seven, four and two-and-a half-years-old. Police investigators, who described the incident as a macabre case of human sacrifice tainted with devil worship, said they obtained a confession from a certain relative of how the baby met her death. Police said they were told that the baby died and was “cremated” on Republic Day, September 24. When Newsday visited the shack where the children lived, there were patches of burnt debris littering the yard in which stood the couple’s eight-by- eight feet shack which is no more than seven feet high. The shack is surrounded by thick bushes and trees and is barely visible from the road. There are no houses closeby, but villagers said the couple and the children hardly ever emerged from the shack.
 
Neighbours said they have never seen the couple, nor the children wear clothes, just pieces of bags tied around their waists. Crystal Maharaj, 16, said she might have been the only person in the village who conversed with the family. “They were strange people. You wouldn’t like to hear the names of the children. They were never given real names. I realised the baby was there; like sometimes I would go and visit. They never accepted anything from people,” Maharaj, who live about 100 metres from the couple, said. The girl, who was interviewed in the presence of her parents, said the children were so malnourished, they weighed less than 15 pounds. Maharaj told Newsday that on several occasions this year, Community Police and nurses from the Point Fortin Hospital Social Welfare Department visited the family. “They attempted to take the children away, but he would run them,” Maharaj said. Police said yesterday that the children were being kept at an orphanage. The bones are to be sent to the Forensic Sciences Centre today for analysis.