The newborn, just two days old, was not killed by his mother or by anyone else on the Silver Whisper cruise ship. According to the initial autopsy results, his death occurred from natural causes. The mother, the 28-year-old Filipino Chan Jheansel Pia Salahid, has been released from prison and can now leave the Florentine penitentiary of Sollicciano where she was confined by her on Monday.
The decision to let her out was taken by judge Sergio Compagnucci of Grosseto based on the preliminary report of the medical examiner, Mario Gabbrielli. Already yesterday morning the investigating judge, after having validated the arrest of the 28-year-old, had reclassified the crime from voluntary homicide to that of abandonment of a minor. Now it is the medical examiner, who also has 90 days to deliver the complete report, to define a scenario different from that of voluntary homicide hypothesized by the deputy prosecutor Giovanni De Marco of the Grosseto prosecutor’s office.
The autopsy found no signs of external violence on the newborn, the death was not due to external factors. According to one hypothesis, it cannot even be ruled out that the child suffered an infection due to the precarious conditions in which he found himself born on the ship and despite his mother’s attempts to try to make him survive after giving birth to him on May 17th. . The woman gave birth while the cruise ship was sailing up the Tyrrhenian Sea and was in the Argentario canal. Two days later, on Sunday, the body was discovered and the alarm was raised. The woman was arrested in prison on the very serious charge of killing the child. Now, thanks to the protective interrogation, which lasted three hours and was carried out with an English-speaking interpreter, you have clarified many aspects.
“I didn’t want to starve my baby. I looked after him, washed him and fed him,” the young girl told the judge in tears. She hadn’t told anyone that she was pregnant, she also explained, because “otherwise I would have been fired. I didn’t think I was this far along with my pregnancy.” When she embarked she thought “maybe she could give birth in Nice”, the final stop of the cruise. She told the judge that it would be her intention, once she returned to the Philippines, to entrust the child to his natural father, with whom she had a relationship that has already ended, because she alone “could not have raised him as she was already committed to maintaining her family of six.” However, the arrest of her two colleagues and cabin mates was not validated, and they were released.
