The mummified body of a newborn baby, wrapped in an almost 40-year-old newspaper has been found under the floorboards of an apartment in the Russian Urals city of Yekaterinburg, news site Life News said on Wednesday.
The owner of the flat, identified only as Yelena F., discovered the corpse while replacing the old floorboards in the apartment she inherited from her deceased mother.
"The body was wrapped in the newspaper Uralsky Rabochy, dated October 13, 1972. It gives us grounds to believe that this was when the body was hidden," an investigator said.
The body showed no visible signs of violent death, but it was so badly preserved that even the gender remains a mystery.
Investigators believe the deceased baby could have been Yelena's sibling, as her mother moved into the apartment in 1969.
Tissue samples have been taken to establish whether the baby was stillborn.
"A pre-investigation check is being conducted at the moment, but a criminal case is unlikely to be launched ... The statute of limitations for serious crimes is 15 years, and that expired long ago," the investigator said.
MOSCOW, August 15 (RIA Novosti)
