Pictured: Woman who 'murdered mother-to-be and cut her full-term baby alive from her womb'

A crazed American woman cut open the womb of a pregnant mother to steal her baby and later tried to claim it was her own.

Sisouvanh Synhavong, 23, bound and gagged her victim before using a craft knife to slice open her stomach.

Araceli Camacho Gomez, who was two weeks away from giving birth, died from loss of blood after the gruesome attack. She was also stabbed multiple times in the chest.

Accused: Sisouvanh Synhavong appears in court over the stabbing death

When police arrested Synhavong she was still clutching part of the baby's umbilical cord.

The newborn baby boy was on the backseat of her car, and she repeatedly asked police: "Is my baby OK?"

Police initially believed she had just given birth and took her to hospital where tests quickly showed she had not delivered a baby.

Minutes later, police found the body of her 23-year-old victim in a park.

A search of Synhavong's bag revealed the bloody knife used in the attack, a baby bottle and blue latex gloves covered in blood.

They also found rope similar to that used to bind the victim.

Synvahong is believed to have kidnapped the 27-year-old mother-of-two earlier in the evening after tricking her way into her home.

Friends said Gomez met Synhavong on a bus and she offered to give her some baby clothes.

The horrific attack took place in Kennewick in Washington state.

The baby boy survived being cut from the womb but is in a critical condition in Kennewick Hospital on a life-support system.

Synhavong is expected to be charged with first degree murder and will face the death penalty if convicted.

Police said her victim, who has two children aged ten and seven, had her hands and feet bound with rope and she had also been gagged.

Court documents revealed she had suffered "massive trauma" to the stomach area. An autopsy also revealed stab wounds to her chest.

Court documents allege that Sisouvanh Synhavong called 911 at 11.04pm, Friday saying she was by a JC Penney store, had just given birth and that she thought the baby had died.

Paramedics responding to the call were unable to locate Synhavong, but minutes later she called 911 again and they found her in a shopping mall car park.

A “significant amount of blood and pieces of human tissue” were found in the back seat, court documents said.

The report also said Synhavong was holding part of the baby's umbilical cord.

Gomez's husband had reported her missing after she failed to return home last Friday.

The site was a mile or two from the spot where Gomez's body was later found, but it wasn't immediately clear whether Gomez was killed at the site where her body was found, or was killed elsewhere and the body dumped there.

Police believe Synvahong, who married a month ago, tricked Gomez into getting into her white 4x4 by promising to get her some baby clothes.

It's unclear if Gomez was killed before her baby was cut from her womb or if she still was alive at the time.

Little is known about Synvahong, who is of Laotian descent, other than she does not have a criminal record.

She is being held without bail, with another court appearance scheduled on Wednesday.

Friends told local news organisations that she had claimed she was expecting.

The gruesome killing comes less than a month after an Illinois woman was jailed for life without parole for killing her pregnant friend, the unborn child and the victim’s three children.

Tiffany Hall, 26, admitted hitting her 23-year-old friend repeatedly on the head with a table leg and then cutting the foetus from her womb in a bathtub in September, 2006.

After the pregnant mother bled to death, Hall dumped her body in an empty building lot nearby in St Louis and then told police she had been sexually assaulted and given birth to a stillborn baby following the attack.

Three days later. Hall drowned her victim's three children, aged seven, two and one, in the same bathtub where she murdered their mother.

In April, a judge in Kansas City, Missouri, sentenced another woman to death after she was found guilty of murdering an expectant mother and kidnapping the baby from her womb.

Lisa Montgomery, 39, strangled pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnet, 23, to death and then cut out her foetus in 2004.

She was found in a neighbouring state - where she had claimed the baby as her own - after an intense nationwide search.

Montgomery first contacted her victim through the internet, saying she was interested in breeding dogs.

Montgomery is only the third woman on federal death row in the US.

