A German mother and a Greek father have been arrested after a dead baby was discovered in a raid on a holiday flat in Athens.

The newborn boy was found in a jar and hidden in a suitcase after a family tried to move out of a second-story flat.

The baby was found to have been stabbed ten times in the back by forensic pathologist Symeon Mesogitis.

The coroner could not determine the age of the baby, due to the condition of the body which had wounds to its back.

Initial inquiries suggest the child was eight to nine months old when it died and may have been moved from another location in the Greek capital.

The father allegedly told police that the baby had ‘cried constantly’ and had been swapped in hospital with a ‘satanic child’.

According to reports, he told police ‘as soon as he died our house calmed down’.

Neighbours reported ‘strange relationships’ in the flat with police arresting a 25-year-old Afghan man and finding three children in the flat, including a pregnant 15-year-old girl.

A neighbour alerted the landlord to the group had been living on the second floor for about a month.

They had seen the children going out alone onto the street.

He said the front door was often left open, with people waiting outside who would ring ahead to be let in.

The 38-year-old German woman initially claimed that it was her own fetus and that she had aborted it about eight months ago, a claim that will be investigated.

Police found ‘many sex toys’ at the flat on Thasos Street. Police are also carrying out DNA tests on the children to check they are related to the adults, with local reports saying the children are being tested for STI’s.

Their landlord told local media: ‘I suspected that something was going on. And I went to the apartment to see what was going on and from three people I saw six, I saw an Afghan and some things started to not make sense.’

He said he locked their belongings inside so they could not vanish before police arrived.

He added: ‘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.

‘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 said.

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