Workers recovered the bodies of 15 babies with what appeared to be hospital identification tags attached that had been put inside plastic bags and dumped into an eastern Chinese river, state media said on Tuesday.
The workers collected the bags, at least one of which was marked "hospital waste," from the Guangfu river in the suburbs of Jining city, Shandong province, the Beijing News and other media reported.
"The bodies, which had started decomposing, still had tags on their legs with names, height and weight information but no hospital name," the official China Daily said, DPA reported.
Local health officials suspected the bodies, which were found on Sunday, were probably "dumped by hospitals as medical waste after dying from diseases or abortion," the newspaper said.
The Beijing News quoted sources as saying a private operator may have dumped the waste into the river after a local hospital contracted out its medical waste disposal.
But city health official Zhong Haitao told the newspaper that the bodies could have fallen into the river from a nearby waste disposal centre.
State media have reported several cases of hospitals dumping medical waste in recent years, including used syringes which were washed and resold, and the burial of radioactive waste on hospital property.
A hospital in the central province of Hubei last year admitted dumping eight bodies that police found at a local construction site, state media said.
A spokesman for the Central Hospital in Hubei's Xiangfan city said mortuary staff had buried the bodies of two adults and six aborted foetuses at the site after the bodies went unclaimed for several months.
Reacting to that case last year, Tan Xiaodong, a public health expert at Hubei's Wuhan University, told China Daily that the most likely reason for such dumping was because China lacked any specific regulations on how to dispose of unclaimed bodies.