8 children’s bodies found in separate house slayings

FIVE children between the ages of three and nine were found dead in a house in the northern German village of Darry yesterday, 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.

No further details were immediately available.

Darry is 40km east of Kiel, near the Baltic Sea.

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.

Meanwhile, earlier yesterday, police said they had found the third corpse of an infant girl wrapped in a plastic bag on the balcony of the home 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 children ages 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 yesterday’s discovery.

The cases follows the starvation death of a 5-year-old girl last month in the eastern town of Schwerin.