The death of the baby found yesterday in an apartment in Kypseli, Athens, is being treated as a criminal act, according to the findings of a forensic examination carried out by coroner Symeon Mesogitis.

Mesogitis found at least 10 knife wounds of differing sizes on the child’s back, and the case is being treated as infanticide.

According to initial estimates, the baby was born and then killed. However, it has not yet been possible to determine either the infant’s age or the time of death.

Authorities found the baby’s body inside a container hidden in a suitcase, triggering a string of further revelations. Investigations are ongoing as police work to establish every aspect of the case.

A resident who alerted the building manager to what she had observed happening in the block told Orange Press, a Greek media outlet, that the couple had been living on the second floor for about a month, and that she had seen the children going out alone onto the street in the mornings. Her husband said the front door was often left open, and that they had seen people waiting outside who would signal on their phones to be let in. These behaviours eventually led her to alert the building manager.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that the 15-year-old girl, who is pregnant, and the nine-year-old boy, one of two boys who were in the Kypseli flat when officers from Greece’s DIAS rapid-response police unit responded to a complaint from the building manager, were found to be suffering from sexually transmitted infections. Police sources have also confirmed that suitcases containing sexual objects were found in the flat.

The second of the two boys, aged 12, is in hospital undergoing tests to assess his health.

The children had previously been taken to a children’s hospital in Athens, and a file on the family already existed with social services.

“The Afghan man hit the 15-year-old and I locked up their belongings so they couldn’t leave”

The building manager, speaking to Protothema.gr, described “strange” relationships between the people found in the flat, and revealed that the 15-year-old girl had been beaten by the 25-year-old Afghan man who was arrested.

It was the manager who, on realising something was wrong at the property, alerted the police and then locked away the couple’s belongings so they could not disappear.

“Because there was some problem with payments, and we’d also had complaints from the building’s management, I suspected something was going on. So I went to the flat to see what was happening, and where there should have been three people I saw six, including an Afghan man, and things stopped making sense. So I locked their belongings inside, on the pretext that the man who had been caught with drugs would come and that he wouldn’t be able to leave without paying what he owed. I wasn’t interested in the debt, I just realised something was wrong.

“They left the flat in a dreadful state. I waited for the man to come afterwards, he wasn’t answering his phone, and during all this a little girl came out, the one who is pregnant by the Afghan man, and he started hitting her inside the room,” says the manager of the property, which he believes had been rented using a forged ID.

“They stayed in the flat for about a month, they’d booked it for two people. Then a nine-year-old child came out of one of the rooms who looked nothing like the others. That’s when I started to suspect something and locked away all their belongings. Inside the flat there were some sex toys, a camera, a laptop and drugs. There was no sense to the relationships between them, none of it added up,” he adds.