Babies Gagged By Nurses

A PROBE has been launched after orphan babies in a hospital were gagged by nurses to stop them crying.

The shocking cruelty case was discovered by a patient who heard their muffled cries.

Elena Kuritsyna, who had been in the Russian hospital with her own children, was told to mind her own business when she complained to medics.

But a criminal investigation has been launched after she used her mobile phone camera to gather evidence.

She filmed one baby lying in a cot with his mouth taped and saw others with dummies tied to their mouths.

Elena said she became concerned when she heard the suppressed crying of young children in the next ward.

She said: “I heard a baby in a neighbouring room. When I looked, I saw the baby with a plaster over his mouth. He could not cry, he was just mumbling.”

But when she asked a nurse what was going on, she was ordered to ignore it and was told the children were crying too loudly and distracting the nurses.

A maternity nurse at the hospital in the Urals region has been suspended for “brutally mistreating abandoned newborns”.

Some reports suggested the nurse had taped babies’ mouths shut so that their crying did not “bother her during work”.

But on TV, the hospital’s chief doctor defended low-paid staff.

He said there was nothing harmful in the practice, which was briefly applied to prevent babies from spitting out dummies and to spare nurses in an understaffed hospital the need to pick them up.

Health officials said the hospital’s chief doctor had been “reprimanded for negligence”.

A spokesman added: “Children in the first year of life were systematically gagged with plaster to make them behave quietly.”

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