A Korean couple let their baby starve to death while they were busy raising a virtual child online, police said.
The couple, from Suwon in South Korea, would leave their three-month-old daughter home alone in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day playing a Second-Life style3D fantasy game called Prius Online, The Sun newspaper reports.
Police said the couple had become totally immersed in the online game and neglected their real lives, giving their daughter just a bottle of milk per day.
Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and 25-year-old mother Choi Mi-sun called paramedics when they arrived home from a stint in a net cafe to find their daughter dead In September last year.
The couple first told police they had found their daughter dead when they woke in the morning, but suspicions were raised by the malnourished state the baby was found in.
"She appears to have starved to death because she was not fed for such a long period of time," a spokesman for Korea's national crime laboratory said after an autopsy was carried out.
The couple fled after the baby's funeral, but police tracked them down and charged them with child abuse and neglect on Tuesday.
The parents told police they had not been to a net cafe in their five months on the run due to their "sense of guilt".
South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a high rate of internet game participation among its population.
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