Police in Lusaka have apprehended a couple that is suspected to have strangled its six-day-old baby girl on suspicion that the child did not resemble the father.
Lusaka Province police commissioner Lemmy Kajoba confirmed the arrest of Jackson Mayabi Muyaba, 27 and his wife Lisulo Mwangala 24, both of John Laing compound in Lusaka on Friday.
The couple is in police custody to assist with further investigations to establish who was behind the gruesome murder of the child, as they were counter accusing each other.
Facts were that on June 6, 2014, Mwangala, 24, successfully gave birth to a baby girl at the University Teaching Hospital after which her husband Muyaba took her home.
But on June 10, 2014, Muyaba accused his wife of having committed adultery and claimed that the child did not resemble him as it did not have features that would be related to him.
“This man Muyaba allegedly picked a knife, according to his wife, who he then asked to tell him the truth. They had a heated quarrel and eventually the man picked a bottle and broke it into half and stabbed his wife on the thigh in trying to force her to state the truth on the real father of the baby and to make her admit that she had an affair with another man,” Kajoba said.
Kajoba said Muyaba allegedly continued to stab his wife on the buttocks telling her to kill the child or he would instead kill her if she failed to heed to his instructions.
“After stabbing her, Mwangala, could not let go of her child but her husband beat her badly and grabbed the child. He then allegedly strangled the child to death after leaving his wife injured and in a pool of blood,” Kajoba said.
“He Muyaba then allegedly packed the dead child in its bag for nappies and went and threw the child in Ngwenya Dam in Misisi compound.”
Some people who saw Mwangala pregnant and later on with a baby started wondering as to where the baby had disappeared.
“So police using that information from curious residents picked up the husband to Mwangala who was working at a Take-Away Joint at Makeni Shopping Mall. After questioning him at Embassy Police, he led officers to his house in John Laing where we discovered the wife sick with wounds on her body,” Kajoba said.
“The man Muyaba didn’t even dare take his wife to the hospital for fear of being questioned. So we picked them and brought them to the police and after questioning them, the man revealed yesterday Friday that he had thrown the baby in the dam where the body which had been lying in the dam for almost two weeks was retrieved and a postmortem conducted revealed that the baby died of strangulation.”
The incident, which happened on June 10, 2014, was only reported to the police on Thursday. Kajoba said once the police had thoroughly interrogated the couple, they will formally charge it.