Mother arrested after remains of nine newborns found

POLICE have discovered the remains of nine newborn babies buried in a garden in eastern Germany and arrested a woman believed to be the children’s mother, prosecutors said yesterday.

The bodies were found yesterday in the garden of a house in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near the Polish border, said Michael Neff, a spokesperson for prosecutors in nearby Frankfurt an der Oder.

Mr Neff said the 39-year-old woman was believed to be the mother of the children and was being held on suspicion of manslaughter.

Investigators believed the children were born between 1998 and 2004 and that they had died shortly afterward, Mr Neff said.

Mr Neff said police found the remains after receiving a tip-off after someone who had been working at the property found what appeared to be human bones. Police said dozens of officers and sniffer dogs were searching the sprawling garden to see if other bodies had been buried there.

The discovery came after a string of similarly gruesome finds elsewhere in Germany.

Last week, a dead baby girl was found in a public toilet in Magdeburg and an infant boy on a recycling company’s conveyer belt in Guetersloh.

In June, a walker in Lower Saxony found a baby in a plastic bag whose throat had been cut.

In neighbouring Austria, authorities are holding the parents of at least three of four infants whose bodies were found in a freezer and entombed in concrete-filled buckets.