Mother accused of cutting baby's throat

A history professor accused of fatally slitting her six-month-old daughter’s throat was charged with second-degree murder in the US.

The girl, Raya Donagi, was found bleeding and unconscious on Monday night after her grandmother called authorities in St Paul, Minnesota.

Police said the girl’s mother, Mine An Ener, gave the infant her morning feeding and then carried her to the bathroom, pausing in the kitchen to get a knife. Police said she told them she laid the baby on her back and then leaned over, pressing the 12-inch knife’s blade twice across Raya’s throat.

“I killed my baby with a knife,” authorities said Ener, 38, told medics when they arrived.

Police said Ener sat with her hands crossed in front of her chest, her mother holding her from behind as the medics tried to revive the child at the grandmother’s St Paul home.

Ener, a professor at Villanova University in western Pennsylvania, had recently returned to Minnesota with her daughter to be with family as she struggled with depression, police and relatives said.

Ener told police she suffered from postpartum depression and was on medication. The child was born with Down syndrome and at one point needed to be fed through a tube. She told police she wanted to give the baby relief.

“She felt the baby was suffering,” said police Sergeant Bruce Wynkoop.

Ener, who was being held in police custody, also told police she had thought about killing herself for several weeks.

A preliminary autopsy showed the baby bled to death from two neck wounds.

Ener, a St Paul native, earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan and took a job at Villanova in 1996. She worked in the university’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

“She’s had a very good and strong record here,” said John Johannes, vice president of academic affairs at Villanova. “She’s being published and she’s a good scholar. She is very accomplished.”