French police in the city of Montpellier arrested a 13-year-old Bosnian migrant girl for pickpocketing and found that the young girl was also eight and a half months pregnant.
The young girl was arrested after being caught attempting to steal the contents of a bag belonging to a local 38-year-old woman at the Gare Saint-Roch tram station after an accomplice of the girl had tried to distract the woman.
Police arrested the heavily pregnant young girl, who had already been arrested just weeks prior, and took her to a local hospital emergency room. The hospital, however, claimed that the young girl escaped from custody and she has been on the run since Tuesday.
The incident comes as crimes committed by unaccompanied minor migrants have surged across parts of France in the last several years.
Earlier this year in Bordeaux, four underage migrants were arrested during the Chinese coronavirus lockdown after they had robbed or attempted to rob 28 pharmacies in the city and the area around it.
Last year, three underage Algerian migrants were arrested in Spain after they fled France following the alleged murder of a man which the trio are said to have live-streamed on social media.
28-year-old Ahmed Kourak was brutally killed in the city of Lyon after being bound and tortured, suffering at least 60 stab wounds before dying.
The three migrants suspected of the murder were caught in Valencia by Spanish police after they had been stopped on the local metro for not having tickets.
Figures released by the Assembly of French Departments (ADF) in 2019 suggested that minor migrants cost French taxpayers as much as two billion euros per year.
A more recent report from the NGO Save the Children stated that since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, European Union member states have taken in at least 210,000 underage migrants.