Autopsy to determine cause of death of six-month old Magda

Mourners pay respects at area where body was found: photo - PAP/Andrzej Grygiel

“I can confirm that the autopsy is scheduled for Monday, likely in the afternoon,” a spokeswoman for the regional prosecutor's office in Katowice, Marta Zawada-Dybek, told journalists, Sunday.

The body was found 1.5 kilometres from where the mother, 22 year-old Katarzyna W. said she left the body after dropping the young girl on the floor at their home near Sosnowiec, in southern Poland.

In a case that has gripped the country, the mother was arrested for a period of two months on Saturday on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

The mother had originally claimed that the girl, Magda, had been abducted in the street on 24 January.

The police immediately launched a search for what was presumed to have been a kidnapped Magda, only for the mother to later confess to a private detective that the kidnap was a fiction and she had, in fact, dropped the girl on the floor at home, where Magda had died after hitting her head on the hard floor.

In panic, claimed the mother, she had taken the body to a riverbed not far from the home and left it “near a tree”.

When the police eventually found the body on Friday night it was frozen and covered in snow, in temperatures of around minus 20 degrees Celsius.

The Rzeczpospolita daily is claiming Monday morning that police had found no evidence of a head injury on the body, which would contradict the mother's evidence.

The report had not been confirmed by police, however. (pg)