THE mother of the young boy whose body was found in a suitcase last week in Minorca has apparently confessed to having drowned the then nine-year-old Cesar in the bath, National Police chief Bartolome Campaner said yesterday, and she was being held on remand in prison last night.
The 30-year-old mother was arrested in Minorca on Friday afternoon and appeared before a remand hearing in Mahon yesterday to be sent to jail and denied bail.
The National Police called a press conference in Palma yesterday morning to provide further details about the case and to also exhibit the evidence.
The mother, originally from Galicia, first told the police on Friday that she had found her son, then aged nine, dead and, scared because she was single, placed his body in a suitcase and hid it near a dry river bed on a farm in the south of the island.
Two bothers found the suitcase last week and within a record 72 hours, the police managed to identify the victim and locate and arrest his mother.
The suspect has since told the police that she gave birth to her son in A Coruña, Galicia, where she lived until meeting her partner, who lived in Mahon, on an internet social networking site towards the end of 2007. In March, 2008, she decided to move to the island and left her son with his biological father. However after a while she began to regret what she had done and returned to Galicia to place her son in the care of her parents.
But, the grandparents believed that the son should be with his mother and sent Cesar to live with her on July 1, 2008.
However, the suspect had never told her partner that she had a son and, according to the police, had even told him that her parents were dead.
So, when her son arrived, she claimed he was a nephew and that he was only going to be spending ten days on the island.
The police suspect that, once that period had transpired, the mother took matters into her own hands.
National Police spokesperson, Janka Jurkiewicz, explained yesterday that, after allegedly drowning her son, the suspect placed his body inside the large 80 by 60 centimetre suitcase which was found last Tuesday. Amongst other personal items was a Manga comic which, with the cooperation of the publisher, the police were able to date and establish that it could not have been sold before 2007. Also, inside one of the boxes of crayons, they found the name Cesar J.F. written on the back of a rubber.
All this data was entered into the search for a missing child matching these criteria but no missing Spanish or foreign children of those characteristics were registered as missing.
But, the police did discover a child originally born in Noia (A Coruña) who did match the description and whose DNI identity card had not been renewed.
The police contacted the grandparents who said that the child was in Minorca with his mother.
When police first spoke to the mother, she said that Cesar was in Galicia with his grandparents and father. The police became very suspicious by this contradiction and they decided to arrest the mother on Friday and, faced with the evidence police had obtained, the mother apparently confessed claiming that she had grown tired of having to hide the secret of her son from her partner.
According to the police, the suspect has no criminal record, is currently in a stable relationship and had a job as a security guard at Mahon airport until being made redundant.