Investigators carry bags containing aborted foetuses found in the mortuary storage room of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. More than 2,000 illegally aborted foetuses have now been uncovered at the temple.

More than 2,000 bodies, wrapped in plastic bags, have now been uncovered in the temple’s three mortuary rooms and police said they have now finished searching the building.

After authorities found 348 foetuses in an initial search earlier in the week, two temple undertakers confessed to stashing them, leading to the new inspection, police said.

“A total of 1,654 foetuses were found today in two rooms,” Colonel Sombat Milintajinda, area commander of Bangkok Metropolitan Police, told AFP.

He said some had been stored there for more than a year.

The discoveries have shocked Thailand and highlighted the scale of illegal abortions in a country where the procedure is only allowed when delivery would harm the mother or the pregnancy is the result of rape.

“This reflects the severity of the problem,” said Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, although he rejected suggestions that the abortion law be amended, saying it was “flexible enough”.

The public health ministry, which ordered a nationwide crackdown on abortion clinics as a result of the finds, estimates that of one million pregnancies in Thailand each year, 80,000 are illegally terminated.

So far a 33-year-old woman has been arrested and confessed to carrying out illegal abortions, said Sombat. She faces between five and 10 years in prison.

He said authorities are also looking to charge the two undertakers, who told police they were hired separately by a network of abortion clinics and had no idea how many foetuses they had stored in the mortuary.

They would normally have disposed of the corpses by placing them with the remains of people being cremated, but the furnaces had broken and the number of stored bodies had built up while repair work was carried out.

Buddhist temples in Thailand not only perform cremation ceremonies, but also store bodies in specially refrigerated areas.