Man Slits Newborn's Throat After Being Mocked For Fathering Child At 47

A 47-year-old man killed his newborn after he was ridiculed by his neighbors for fathering a child at the age of 47. The incident took place in a remote part of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Police arrested the man and his wife Monday night after authorities found that they were involved in the killing.

Dilip Chakraborty and his wife Suniti, 42, had the baby girl last week. This was the couple's sixth child together. The body of the baby was found with her throat slit in a water body.

“The Chakrabortys have three daughters and two sons, and also a grandchild from her eldest daughter. One of the possibilities is that they were being taunted by neighbors and villagers for giving birth to a child at an advanced age,” an officer of the local police station at Jalpaiguri district said, according to Hindustan Times.

The couple reportedly confessed the crime, and charges are yet to be placed on them.

Police are investigating the case and are trying to determine whether the gender of the child played any role in the crime. Killing and abandoning baby girls are common practices in India, where the preference is mostly for a male child.

Last month, a father desperate to have a son killed his four-day-old baby girl with a knife in Gandhinagar, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. This was the sixth time in a row when the man had a girl child.

After an increase in the number of female infanticide in the country, the government made sex-selective abortions illegal. The Pre-conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994 (amended in 2003) in India prohibits sex-selection or disclosure of the sex of the fetus. It also prohibits sale of “any ultrasound machine or any other equipment capable of detecting sex of fetus” to persons, laboratories and clinics not registered under the Act.