WARSAW, Poland (AFP) — A Polish doctor has been taken into custody after 34 human foetuses were found buried in the garden of her former home, the authorities said on Monday.

Magdalena H a 57-year-old medical pathologist with no previous criminal record — is suspected of using the foetuses to perform experiments and now faces up to 12 years in prison.

Her case has whipped up a storm in traditionally Catholic Poland, with many questioning how she managed to obtain the unborn babies’ bodies in a country with some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe.

But a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said that there is so far no evidence she had obtained the foetuses through illegal abortions.

The charges against the doctor include desecrating corpses, improper waste handling and abandoning hazardous materials in an unauthorised location.

Last week, prosecutors in southeastern Poland were tipped off that medical waste had been discovered during construction work in her former house in the southeastern village of Lutoryz.

Following a major search of the area involving dozens of police officers, radar and dogs, at least 34 foetuses were found buried in the garden.

“This waste was most likely used by the detained woman to perform tests,” the spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office in Rzeszow, Krzysztof Ciechanowski, said.

Unnamed sources told Poland’s Radio Eska that Magdalena H had removed the foetuses during the Covid-19 pandemic from a hospital in Rzeszow where she worked, in order to conduct tests on them at home.

Aside from the bodies, tens of thousands of microscope slides, paraffin blocks and “fragments of documentation” were discovered during the search, he added.

The doctor was subsequently arrested on Friday and ordered to serve three months of pre-trial detention.

After hearing the charges, the doctor did not plead guilty, but “indicated that she herself brought and buried the human foetuses found on her property, as well as other medical waste”, the prosecutor’s spokesman said at a press conference.

The identities of the foetuses have yet to be determined, and it is yet unknown if Magdalena H — whose last name has been withheld under Polish privacy laws — acted alone.