A South Korean couple left their baby daughter to starve to death at home while playing an online game which ironically simulated child-rearing, police said Friday.<\/p>\n
The man aged 41 and his 25-year-old wife were arrested Thursday, five months after they reported the death of their three-month-old baby, a police investigator in the city of Suweon just south of Seoul told AFP.<\/p>\n
The father met his wife in 2008 through the Internet. They had been on the run since their baby died.<\/p>\n
“They were formally arrested yesterday,” the investigator said, declining to give details.<\/p>\n
The baby was found dead last September 24 and an autopsy showed her death was caused by a long period of malnutrition.<\/p>\n
The couple had “raised” an online girl character while neglecting their own prematurely born daughter, feeding her just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at a neighbourhood Internet cafe, Yonhap news agency said.<\/p>\n
It quoted police as saying they had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl character called “Anima” in the popular role-playing game “Prius Online”.<\/p>\n
“The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap.<\/p>\n
“They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”<\/p>\n
There have been sporadic reports of deaths related to Internet game addiction in South Korea. Last month a 32-year-old man died after reportedly playing a computer game for five days with few breaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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