The Oita District Court handed down a suspended two-year prison term Tuesday to a woman found guilty of burying her 2-year-old daughter’s corpse near a cemetery close to her home last September.

Yuko Yamaguchi, 35, claimed she found her daughter, Kotone Emoto, dead under a blanket at their home in Hiji, Oita Prefecture, on the morning of Sept. 13. She said she took the body by car to a wooded area near the cemetery and left it.

Partial remains of the girl were found five months later, after Yamaguchi confessed in February to dumping the corpse.

The incident became a high-profile case because Yamaguchi, whose family name was Emoto at the time, called the police on Sept. 13 and said her daughter had disappeared from her car in a Hiji supermarket parking lot while she was inside shopping.

After turning herself in on Feb. 5, Yamaguchi confessed that she abandoned the body because she panicked after finding her dead at home. Earlier reports said that a 7-year-old brother of the girl also lived in the house at the time.

The Oita police and the Oita District Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped efforts to determine the cause of the girl’s death, lacking any eyewitness or hard evidence. Police only found bone fragments when they searched the woods some 3 km east of Yamaguchi’s home after she confessed.

An investigator who declined to be named said that if police had found her corpse earlier, they could have been able to establish the cause of death. “It was the failure of the police,” the officer said.

Presiding Judge Hidenaga Manabe said that Yamaguchi “bears grave criminal responsibility as she undermined the dignity of the girl as well as the family members’ love and respect for her . . . but she confessed to police and deeply regrets what she has done.”

The public prosecutors had demanded a two-year prison term for Yamaguchi without suspension.

Her lawyers had pleaded for a suspended term because Yamaguchi had pleaded guilty to dumping the corpse.