Couple short of cash abandon children

A GERMAN couple abandoned three young children in Italy because they had run out of money, a police official said yesterday, adding that the mother had been charged.

Her partner, who is wanted by German authorities, was under arrest.

Caterina Remhof, 26, and Sascha Schmidt, 24, who is not the father of the children, walked out of a restaurant in the northern town of Aosta on Sunday after ordering a pizza for the children, believed to be aged four, two and eight months.

Police stepped up patrols at Italy’s borders, ports, train stations and airports, and broadcast their picture, but they were finally found in a wood outside Aosta late on Thursday.

A senior Aosta police official, Lorenzo Mesiano, said Remhof had been charged with abandoning the children and allowed to go free.

Her parents had arrived in Aosta to accompany them back to Germany, where social services would take care of them.

Schmidt meanwhile was under arrest pending the receipt of an international warrant from Germany.

German police said earlier that he was on the run after not returning to prison while on parole.

Prosecutors said he had been jailed for crimes including blackmail and that his sentence had been due to end in mid-2011.