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A doctor has been accused of experimenting on unborn babies after authorities found 34 foetuses buried in her old back garden in Poland.

Construction workers made the gruesome discovery after digging up part of a property suspect Magdalena H used to live in, in the southeastern village of Lutoryz, Polish police said.

The 57 year-old medical pathologist was arrested at a hotel in Zamość on Friday morning and is accused of performing experiments on the remains.

She is facing charges of desecrating corpses, improper waste handling and abandoning hazardous materials in an unauthorised location.

Magdalena H, who has not been fully named due to Polish privacy laws, faces 12 years in prison if convicted.

“On June 10, 2026, the District Prosecutor’s Office in Rzeszów was notified of the discovery of significant quantities of medical waste items, mainly paraffin blocks and microscope slides, on the premises of a property in Lutoryż,” a police statement said.

“These items were discovered during excavation work on the property. Among the discovered debris was a human fetus and other remains that could have been early-stage human fetuses or fetal fragments.

“Medical experts were dispatched to the scene and confirmed that the remains were those of human fetuses.”

A major search was subsequently conducted of the area involving police officers, forensic teams, radar and dogs.

Magdalena H, who is currently in custody ahead of trial, has “indicated she brought and buried the human foetuses found on her property, as well as other medical waste”, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said at a press conference. There is so far no evidence that the accused obtained the foetuses through illegal abortions, according to Euro News.

A report by Polish radio station Radio Eska instead alleges the suspect removed the foetuses from the hospital where she worked in Rzeszow during the Covid pandemic in order to bring them home to conduct tests on them.

The station suggested that at least 50 foetuses could still be buried at the property with dozens of officers still conducting a thorough search of the area. It is not clear what tests she was allegedly performing or why.

The current owners of the property are a young couple and are not believed to have had any knowledge of the foetuses buried on their land.

Local media suggest that the accused was once a respected member of the medical community, who sold the property last year so she could live with her mother.