Woman Who Threw her Baby Down Rubbish Chute From a Flats Says She Cannot Understand Why She Did It

According to sky news, a woman has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after throwing her baby five floors down a rubbish chute.

Jaymin Abdulrahman was found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm, but cleared of attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent. She will serve half of her sentence.

The 25-year-old put her six-day-old daughter in a bin bag and dropped her more than 40ft (12m) down a chute at a block of flats in Wolverhampton in September 2012.

The child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was discovered with serious head injuries, including a fractured skull, in a bin by her father and taken to Birmingham Children's Hospital.

The rubbish chute the baby was found in

Birmingham Crown Court had heard how the baby would have taken 2.2 seconds to fall down the chute, reaching a maximum speed of 29mph, before hitting a metal plate designed to deflect rubbish into a bin.

The judge said the baby sustained catastrophic head injuries from which she would never fully recover, and would be dependent on other people for the rest of her life.

Justice Kate Thirlwall accepted the incident was not premeditated and Abdulrahman had been suffering from a form of postnatal depression known as postpartum psychosis at the time.

But she told the mother: "You will have to live with the consequences for the rest of your life.

"As you said yourself, you were her mother. You should have been her guardian."

The block of flats in Wolverhampton where the baby was found

Abdulrahman had denied all three charges.

She initially told the police her child had been kidnapped by strangers, but she had been found a few hours later, apparently lifeless.

Prosecutors had alleged that the Iraqi national deliberately placed her daughter into the chute with the intention of killing her.

But Abdulrahman, who accepted that she put her baby into the chute, told the jury she had not planned the incident and had "lost control of her thoughts".

The court heard that she was "tired, sad and exhausted" in the week after her daughter's birth and unaware of why she was crying.

She told jurors: "I was extremely sad. I went to the living room, I put the baby in a rubbish bag and I threw her away.

"After I had done so, I just couldn't believe what I had just done, and I couldn't understand why I did it. I was in shock.

"I can't tell whether I was crying at the time or not, but I have done this. I wasn't aware of what I was doing.

"If I thought that by doing so I would do some harm to the baby, I wouldn't have done it."