The suspect (second left) being led to the police station following her arrest on Sunday night.
LIMBANG: A 22-year-old woman was yesterday produced in the Magistrate’s Court here and remanded for five days until Aug 4 to facilitate further investigation into the murder of her three-year-old stepson.
Her arrest and subsequent remand came after a post-mortem conducted on Sunday determined that the child had died of suffocation due to smothering.
State CID chief Datuk Dev Kumar said following the post-mortem finding, police reclassified the case from sudden death to murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code.
“On July 30, a post-mortem was conducted at Miri Hospital and the cause of death was found to be asphyxia due to smothering.
“At 7.10pm the same day, a team from CID Limbang, led by Insp Andrew Undum, arrested the boy’s stepmother at a longhouse at Kampung Terimah Lubai,” he said in a statement yesterday.
According to Dev Kumar, the woman had lodged a police report on July 27 around 9pm claiming she had discovered her three-year-old stepson lying unconscious on the bathroom floor of their home at 4.20pm.
She claimed that the child was playing alone in the bathroom while she was at the kitchen, and that she later found him unconscious when she returned to the bathroom to check on him.
“She then brought the child to Limbang Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
“The doctor who examined the body found bruises on various parts of the body that were inconsistent with the stepmother’s claim,” he said.