Mexican 'nine-year-old mother' vanishes, may be older

A Mexican girl said to have given birth last month at the age of nine has disappeared with her baby, and authorities now suspect she may be older, a top prosecutor said Thursday.

Hospital officials and prosecutors said this week that a nine-year-old girl named Dafne gave birth to a baby girl by C-section on January 27 in the western state of Jalisco.

Police are seeking a 17-year-old boy believed to be the father.

But Tomas Coronado Olmos, the Jalisco state attorney general, said Thursday that Dafne's own birth registry raised suspicions about her age since her parents only registered it in 2011.

"We have some evidence of irregularities that we need to investigate," Coronado Olmos said, adding that investigators want to conduct a psychological profile of the girl.

Neither Dafne nor her baby were at the address she gave to the hospital where she gave birth in the town of Zapopan.

The mother and the baby, who weighed 2.7 kilos (5.7 pounds) at birth, were released from the hospital in good health.

The state's health secretary, Antonio Munoz, voiced doubts that Dafne could have been so young.

"The medical characteristics of this minor do not correspond to a nine-year-old girl. She could be much older. She seems to be 15 years old," Munoz said.

"The responsibility falls on the family for not taking care of the girl's environment and not notifying the authorities when they discovered the pregnancy," he said. "The harm on the minor is incalculable."

Sources in the Jalisco state prosecutor's office told AFP on Wednesday that the girl declared that she had consensual sex with the boy.

But another official in the prosecutor's office, Jorge Villasenor, described the encounter as a case of rape or child abuse.

(c) 2013 AFP