A 26-year-old woman has been arrested in the eastern Spanish city of Alicante on suspicion of attempting to murder her newborn baby who had to be rescued from inside a building's drains, the interior ministry said on Sunday.

The ministry said the two-day-old boy, who still had his umbilical cord attached and was found wrapped in plastic bags, may have been trapped for 40 hours at a point where the drains converged into a 1 sq metre (1.2 sq yard) manhole in a courtyard.

A neighbour had alerted firefighters to what was originally thought to be a meowing cat trapped ins the drains, the ministry said in a statement.

The baby, who weighed 2.1 kg (4.6lb), is said to be in a serious but not life-threatening condition in hospital, having suffered a fracture to a bone in one arm and unspecified injuries.

The ministry said police found that the unnamed woman lived in the building but had been admitted to Alicante's General Hospital on 21 June where she told medical staff she had suffered a miscarriage.

She told police she had tried to get rid of the baby but had not had enough money to pay for an abortion.

The statement said the mother was under arrest and police were trying to discover whether she acted alone, or if a third party could have been involved in tipping the baby into the building's communal drains.

Last month rescue workers in eastern China had to extract a newborn baby who had become stuck in a sewer pipe after its mother had tried to give birth in secret.