A newborn baby was discovered in the rubbish bin compartment of an Air Mauritius Airbus A330-900 on Saturday, January 1st.
The horrifying discovery was reportedly made by airport officers searching the plane during a routine customs check.
• The abandoned newborn baby boy
Although the boy’s mother is in police custody, it is said that both she and her baby boy are in stable condition.
According to reports, airport officers discovered the newborn baby after screening the plane during a routine customs check.
Acting on the discovery, it would appear that authorities at Mauritius Airport (properly named Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International) conducted a search for the mother of the child while rushing the newborn to the hospital.
A 20-year-old woman from Madagascar was initially suspected of being the child’s mother and arrested on such grounds. Accused of having abandoned her baby, the woman initially denied being the mother.
However, after undergoing a medical examination, it was confirmed that she had recently given birth.
The woman, a national of Madagascar, was apparently headed to Mauritius on a two-year work permit.
She was placed under police surveillance at the hospital and will be questioned further once released from the hospital.
The woman faces charges of abandoning a newborn, and sources disclosed that both mother and child are doing well.
Flight details
Sources note that the incident took place on January 1st, with the flight having landed in Mauritius after flying from Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital and largest city. Piecing the information together, we can conclude that the incident took place aboard an Airbus A330-900 operating Air Mauritius flight MK289.
The aircraft, registered 3B-NBU, had departed Antananarivo (TNR) at 17:08 local time and arrived in Mauritius’ Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport at 19:39. The duration of the flight was a mere 91 minutes, inclusive of time needed for takeoff, climbing to altitude, and landing. Thus it would seem that the mother of the newborn was in active labour for a relatively short amount of time, as this on average lasts between four and eight hours.
As we’ve seen in recent situations, when a known birth occurs onboard, the flight is typically diverted to the nearest suitable airport. One of the most recent examples of this took place at the end of August 2021 when an Afghan woman gave birth onboard a Turkish Airlines flight heading out of Dubai.
In this situation, the Boeing 777 was diverted to Kuwait so that the woman and her newborn could receive medical attention.
However, in the case of Saturday’s events, even if the mother had notified flight attendants of her condition, the nearest suitable facility would have been the destination airport anyways.
