Police recover baby snatched in Frankfurt hospital

A baby girl who was kidnapped on the same day she was born was recovered unharmed near Frankfurt on Thursday, police said.

German police detained two women, both aged 28, who were with the infant, a spokesman said. The police said they acted on a tip-off from a member of the public, dpa reported.

Large numbers of police had been searching the city throughout the afternoon for the missing child.

The main suspect told the newborn's mother at a suburban hospital that the baby needed to be taken away to be photographed. Witnesses then saw two women wheeling a pram away from the ward and out to the street.

The baby girl's mother, 20, had believed the visitor was a hospital staffer, and did not raise the alarm for half an hour.

After the baby was found in suburban Hattersheim, just a couple of kilometres from Hoechst, the western suburb where the kidnap took place, she was quickly reunited with her mother at the hospital.

The parents of the baby are of Lebanese extraction, police said.

The baby, born early Thursday, still had no name when she vanished.

The hospital said it could not comment in detail till it had investigated how the snatch happened.