The Ethiopian eight-month-old baby who was abandoned at the Law Courts on Friday is in good health and being cared for by the Ursuline nuns until police track down his mother.

“The baby slept soundly and this morning he was happily taking his bottle, oblivious to what has been going on,” the Mother Superior at the Sliema crèche told The Sunday Times of Malta when contacted yesterday.

This unusual incident happened on Friday when the baby’s father, Ibrahim Mohammed Abdallah, was condemned to a six-month jail term for falsifying three passports in an attempt to leave Malta with his family.

Seeing her dreams being shattered the woman reportedly pleaded with police to stay with her husband in jail. When failed to get her anywhere, the woman left her son in his pushchair at the door of the Law Courts in Valletta and disappeared.

Until yesterday the police had been unable to track down the woman.

The nuns are also hoping they can reunite the mother with her infant son, but they insisted the baby had found a loving home in the meantime – “it’s as if he’s always been here”. The Mother Superior explained that the police were in contact with the father who has informed them of the baby’s name, but she preferred not to reveal his name and respect the family’s privacy.

The last time a baby was abandoned was in November 2011 when a newborn girl was wrapped in a duffel bag and dropped off on the doorstep of the Ursuline convent in Rabat. The baby had been wearing a nappy, a white babygro and a white shawl with a hood – there was nothing else in the duffel bag.

In 2010, in a similar incident involving a migrant woman, an Eritrean had in desperation abandoned her two-month-old child in the office of a priest.