Police focus on 400 homes as search to find mother of abandoned babies continues

Local TV

The search to find the mother of three children abandoned in London across eight years has been narrowed down to just 400 homes, as police say they “cannot discount” a fourth baby being found as time goes on.

Transcript

00:00All three children were abandoned in areas not covered by CCTV but police have analysed

00:10hundreds of hours of footage in the hope of identifying their mother.

00:16Elsa was found wrapped in a towel in a reusable shopping bag on January 18th last year at

00:24the junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham in sub-zero temperatures.

00:32Roman was found in similar circumstances a short distance away in a play area off Roman

00:39Road in Newham in late January of 2019 as freezing temperatures and snow gripped the capital.

00:49Their brother Harry was found wrapped in a white blanket in Balaam Street in Pleistote in

00:57September 2017 however somewhat miraculously all children survived.

01:04Very much this is about working investigatively to understand who was here in the periods

01:11of both certainly the abandonment of baby number two and baby number three.

01:16Particularly who has either left, who is still here, but because we're now in a position

01:22where we understand a lot more around the DNA profiles of the babies and mum, we can start

01:29to discount individuals residing in the local area through cultural differences in ethnicity

01:37and also the intelligence that's been worked through in the investigation.

01:40So this is very much about trying to work out who was here, who may still be here and if

01:46they're not here then we've got that information that's allowing us then to backtrack and try

01:51and locate those across the United Kingdom.

01:54So on the 18th of January 2024 members of the public alerted emergency services to discovery

02:01of a newborn baby found in a boots plastic bag just on the Greenway footpath right behind us.

02:08The emergency services reacted quickly and were able to get the baby named Elsa by emergency

02:12services to a place of safety.

02:15That was in January of 2024 and five years before almost the same week and members of the public

02:21alerted police to another newborn baby found alive in this park here in Roman Road Park in

02:26fact just on the on the bench behind us.

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