An abandoned baby girl, believed to be four months old, was found being carried by a stray dog in a plastic trash bag in Lebanon early Wednesday morning.
A passerby heard cries from inside the bag as the dog was carrying it in its mouth, outside a government building. The baby was taken to the Islamic Hospital in Tripoli, a city in northern Lebanon, before being moved to the Tripoli Government Hospital on Wednesday, according to The National.
Tripoli is the largest city in north Lebanon and is situated 81 kilometers north of the capital, Beirut, overlooking the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Temperatures at this time of year average 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), harsh conditions for a baby left outdoors.
Tripoli is the second-largest city in a country where about 80 percent of the population is in poverty as a result of an economic crisis that began in 2019.
Images of the baby show visible bruises and scrapes on her face and body.
Social media users were quick to condemn the abandonment of the baby, after images of the baby were posted to Twitter.
Ghassan Rifi, a Lebanese journalist, wrote that the authorities have not yet discovered who abandoned the baby.
“It was not known whether the ‘wild lady’ who threw the child and fled to an unknown destination had intended to throw her in the area so that the dogs would finish her off and eat her corpse or to draw attention to her,” he wrote.
The baby is reported to be recovering in hospital.
News outlets have reported several other incidents of child abuse in Lebanon in recent weeks. A young girl, Lynn Talib, aged 6, died in the northern region of Miniyeh earlier this month. Medical forensic reports revealed that she had been sexually assaulted before her death.
Last week, a nursery employee was arrested and the institution permanently closed after videos appeared of the employee allegedly abusing infants.
Experts judge it is impossible to know whether cases of child abuse are on the rise due to the lack of a central system for monitoring statistics, given the financial difficulties facing state-owned institutions.
But cases of child dumping and abuse have increased recently as the country slides further into difficulty.
