A 3-month-old baby girl in South Africa has been eaten alive by giant rats after her mother left her home alone to go out drinking.
The baby lay on a bed as rodents devoured her before her mother came home to find the baby’s remains, the Daily Mail reported.
Her mother, 26, has been arrested on charges of child neglect.
The girl’s twin brother, Lucky, was spared from death because the mother took him with her on her night out.
“The baby could only have died a painful death. The infant’s tongue, eyes and fingers had all been eaten,” a neighbor said. “This woman must rot in jail. She does not deserve to be a mother.”
“The only thing this woman likes is going out partying in the local shebeens,” said Noluthando Mtshali, daughter of the mother’s landlady. “I just could not bring myself to go in and see what happened to this poor child.”
“When people were asking where the other child was, she would say it was in her sister’s care,” she added.
The surviving twin is now in the custody of his 28-year-old father and his new girlfriend.
This isn’t the first time a baby has been eaten alive by rats.
Rats ate a 4-month-old baby to death in Mexico after the mother left the baby to go out dancing in January.
In 2011, there were two separate cases of rats eating babies in South Africa that happened on the same day. One victim was a 3-year-old girl from Khayelitsha while the other was a baby girl from Soweto township.