By SCOTT INGLIS
A dead newborn boy has been found inside a plastic bag in the Auckland Domain.
Investigators have spent the past two nights trying to find the baby's mother but so far have drawn a blank.
The full-term baby was found about 5 pm on Sunday 300m from the Duck Pond by three people walking along Lovers' Walk - a gravelly bush path below Lover's Lane.
It had been wrapped in a white towel and placed inside the blue Rendells shopping bag. Rendells is a department store chain with seven branches in Auckland.
The head of the Auckland Central combined investigation unit, Detective Senior Sergeant Julian Rinckes, said the baby's mother could be suffering medical complications as a result of the birth.
"We believe the baby was born sometime on Saturday or Sunday and was possibly discarded in the Domain not long before he was found."
Detectives do not have an exact time of death.
The baby is not European but his ethnicity is unclear. An autopsy was unable to tell police what race he was or exact cause of death, a police representative said.
Detective Senior Sergeant Rinckes said he wanted to hear from the mother or anyone who helped to deliver the baby and who saw the baby alongside the walking track.
In April 1997, a one-month premature baby was dumped in a stream in Tokoroa. The baby's body was never found, despite an intensive search, and its 16-year-old mother, a Pacific Islander, was never charged.
In July 1997, a stillborn girl's body was stuffed in a plastic bag and left beneath a house in Wilton St, Grey Lynn. The girl was thought to be a Pacific Islander.
Three months later, a foetus was found by chance at a Auckland rubbish tip.
Baby's body left in shopping bag
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