Shahjahanpur, India —

Her arm was the first thing Shyam Babu saw, tiny and frail, poking through the mud like a discarded doll. But this was no doll. Covered with ants and bleeding from what doctors would later suspect were animal bites, the pig farmer had just made a terrifying discovery near a river in this north Indian village.

Wrapped in a towel, barely stirring, but slightly breathing, was a newborn baby girl buried beneath a foot of earth.

“I went closer and saw that the child’s fingers were moving. I went even closer and could sense a heartbeat,” Babu recalled as he retraced his steps leading to the horrific discovery last month in the sugarcane and paddy fields of rural Shahjahanpur district in Uttar Pradesh state.

“I realized the child was alive…. Someone had buried a baby alive.”

Terrified, he ran to raise the alarm. Soon a crowd was at the scene.

In a frantic but delicate rescue, captured on images and video reviewed by CNN, a policeman dug away the packed earth. The girl, later estimated to be about 15 days old, was completely smeared in mud. Gasping for air, her mouth and nostrils clogged with dirt. As she was lifted from the ground, she let out a weak, painful cry.

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Rushed to the Shahjahanpur Medical College, she was found to have a severe infection, respiratory distress, injuries, and sepsis. The local police started searching for the girl’s parents – and a motive.

Gourav Tyagi, a local officer investigating the case, told CNN they had three theories. Her parents could have believed their sickly child had died and buried her according to local customs. The newborn had syndactyly, a condition where two or more fingers or toes are joined together and could have been abandoned owing to the stigma around disabilities in parts of India.

And there was another angle: that she was discarded because of her gender, another victim of female infanticide in the world’s most populous nation, where a deep-seated preference for sons can lead to girls being abandoned or killed.

Dr.