German police find five dead children in house
Pastor Dale Morgan
German police find five dead children in house*
Reuters
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; 6:30 PM
BERLIN (Reuters) - Five children between the ages of three and nine were
found dead in a house in the northern German village of Darry on
Wednesday, police said.
Their 31-year-old mother has been detained on suspicion of involvement
in the "violent" deaths of the children and has been placed in
psychiatric care, a police statement said.
"Based on preliminary investigation the motive appears to be a
psychiatric illness of the woman," police in the northern city of Kiel said.
Police said they were still investigating and declined to make any
further comment. Darry, a town of 450 residents, is 40 km (25 miles)
east of Kiel, near the Baltic Sea.
The mother had turned herself into police, the NDR 1 Welle Nord radio
network reported, saying the victims were five boys and that she had
drugged them before suffocating them with plastic bags.
Teachers at the local school had notified the youth welfare office about
the run-down appearance of two of the boys, who had come to school
without coats, Spiegel Online reported.
It said workers from the local youth welfare office planned to visit the
family on Wednesday.
In a separate crime earlier on Wednesday in another part of Germany,
police said they found a third corpse of an infant girl wrapped in a
plastic bag on the balcony of a 28-year-old woman arrested last week.
Police in the eastern town of Plauen said the woman said she gave birth
to the girls in February 2002, January 2004 and September 2005, and that
they had died suddenly.
The bodies of two other girls were found in a suitcase and a freezer.
The woman was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.
A police spokesman said the woman, who has two other children aged one
and seven, denied killing the girls.
Police began investigating when the girl born in 2002 did not report for
school registration. They found her corpse in a suitcase stored in a
basement. They found the second corpse in a freezer before making
Wednesday's discovery.
The cases follows the starvation death of a 5-year-old girl last month
in the eastern town of Schwerin.
Also, in 2006, a woman was jailed for 15 years for killing her eight
newborn babies. The remains of the babies were found wrapped in plastic
bags and buried in flower pots, buckets and a fish tank on her property.
(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Philippa Fletcher)