A newborn girl has been found covered in bites and sever sunburn being abandoned on an ant hill by her mother who now faces an attempted murder charge.
Nadezhda Sorokina, 32, from Russia, left the day-old girl in Milenino on July 23 before a horrified passerby spotted the screaming baby.
Nikolai Pakhomov found the newborn covered in agonising ant bites and told local media that he initially thought the baby’s crying was kittens mewing.
The 25-year-old said: ‘Automatically, I dialled ‘112’ and called the paramedics.
‘I took off my T-shirt, wrapped the baby in it, and carried her to the ambulance’.
Medics, who declared the newborn fit apart from the insect bites and sunburn, called in a local priest who named the tot Maria Nikolaevna, in honour of her rescuer.
Maria is in the custody of local child services and there is already a married couple waiting to adopt her, reports local media.
Police later tracked down Sorokina, who now facing an attempted murder charge.
The single mum of three reportedly confessed to giving birth to the girl on July 22 and then abandoning her because she could not afford to feed a fourth child.
One neighbour Veronika Dokukina, however, claims Sorokina may have decided to abandon the baby after a break-up with the girl’s dad.
She said: ‘I have a small child myself — a one-year-old. I was giving her baby clothes, and she said, ‘I don’t need them anymore.’
‘I asked, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘He stressed me out, I got so nervous that I had a miscarriage.’
‘It seems she didn’t have a miscarriage at all, she hid it. It means she planned it in advance.’
Nadezhda’s ex-husband, the father of her other children, claimed he had no knowledge of her actions.
He stated that she was never an exemplary mother, but he could never have imagined this.
It comes after a three-day-old baby girl was found being eaten by ants after being abandoned in remote woodland in Russia in 2015.
Cops began their investigation after a passerby discovered the badly-bitten baby on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk in central Russia.
A police spokesman said at the time: ‘The person that found the baby girl heard her crying and on investigating discovered the child lying on a pile of leaves and covered in ants.
‘It was clear that the child had been abandoned and there was no one else in sight, so they picked her up and called for an ambulance.’
The baby still had an umbilical cord attached when she was found by the man, who was on his way to work.