Police searching for the parents of a three-year-old abandoned in Melbourne have found the body of a young woman in New Zealand.
The body was found in the boot of a car outside Qian Xun Xue's family home in Auckland.
Police stopped short of naming the dead woman as Anan Liu, the 27-year-old missing mother of the girl, but said they had informed the woman's mother in China of the find and said they were treating the death as a murder.
A search is continuing for the girl's father, who is thought to have caught a flight to Los Angeles after abandoning Qian Xun Xue in Melbourne in Australia.
The case has attracted widespread media attention in Australia and New Zealand after images of Qian Xun Xue left alone at a train station on Saturday were aired on television.
The abandoned child's mother, Anan Liu, is reported to have previously fled to China to escape her husband but later returned to Auckland.
A women's refuge said Anan Liu spent a month with them last year and she was given legal help to get a protection order against her husband.
Auckland police also said a woman claiming to be Mr Qian's other daughter from his first marriage, who had been missing since 2000, had called them and given information about the type of man her father was.
