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Body of toddler found inside baptismal basin in Brazil church
SAO PAULO, Brazil: The body of a strangled toddler was found inside the baptismal basin of an evangelical church in southern Brazil, police and church officials said Monday.
Eighteen-month-old Gabrielli Cristina Eichholz was found dead Saturday during services at the recently inaugurated Seventh-day Adventist Church in the city of Joinville, 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest of Sao Paulo, said police inspector Rubens Passos de Freitas.
“Gabrielli was raped and then strangled to death. Her killer or killers also hit her over the head with a heavy blunt object,” Freitas said.
No one has been arrested, and Freitas said police have no suspects. Parishioners of the small two-story concrete church were filtering in and out Monday, saying they were praying for the girl’s soul.
“Everyone is in shock,” church spokesman Felipe Lemos said. “Nothing like this has ever happened in any of our churches anywhere in the world.”
Relatives took her to the church Saturday morning and left her in a room with some 20 other children being cared for by four members of the church, Freitas said.
After the services, Gabrielli’s relatives went to the room to look for her but she was not there.
Parishioners found her floating face down in the baptismal basin, which is next to the altar but placed in such a way that “no one could see the water or anything else inside,” Freitas said.
“I still don’t understand how no one saw or heard anything,” he said.
Freitas said he believes the girl may have been killed in one of the church’s unused rooms or in a bathroom and was then carried to the basin by the killer or killers.
The local O Catarinense newspaper quoted one of the women who had been caring for the children as saying that Gabrielli had been picked up from the room by a man claiming to be her father.
“I can’t understand how something like this could happen inside a church,” Gabrielli’s mother, Andreia Pereira Eichholz, told Joinville’s A Noticia newspaper. “I want to know who grabbed my daughter. I don’t feel any anger or hate. I just want to understand ‘Why?’”
Pereira described her daughter as a happy girl “who was always laughing.”
Her husband, Juliarde, told the newspaper: “I just want justice. I want to know who took my daughter away from us.”
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