Freezer infants 'alive at birth'

Two infants whose bodies were stuffed in a freezer at an Austrian apartment complex where the remains of two other newborns were discovered entombed in cement-filled buckets were alive at birth, authorities said today.

Autopsies performed on the remains of the infants whose bodies were frozen eliminated the possibility that they had been stillborn, said Peter Gruber, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in the southern Austrian city of Graz.

“Two of the children were alive at birth,” he said.

A final autopsy report has not yet been completed, Gruber said, adding that further investigations into at least one of the bodies were needed.

The autopsies were performed on the two bodies found last week wrapped in plastic and stuffed into a chest freezer shared by tenants of the building, Austrian television reported.

Police said yesterday that autopsies could not be done on the other two bodies, which were placed in plastic buckets later filled with cement, because they had deteriorated too much.

Authorities have detained the infants’ 32-year-old mother and her 38-year-old male companion on suspicion of murder and disposals, which stunned the usually tranquil alpine country.

“We hope that we can still determine the exact cause of death,” said Peter Roll of Graz's judicial medical institute, who was overseeing the forensic probe.

Investigators also planned to conduct DNA tests on the woman’s companion to determine if he was the father.

Austrian television quoted police Lt. Col. Werner Jud as saying authorities could not rule out the possibility of finding more bodies on the premises of the apartment complex in Graz, about 120 miles south of Vienna.

Jud said police were checking two previous homes where the unidentified mother lived to ensure no other bodies were hidden there.

“We are trying to determine the woman’s past. Where did she live? Who were her acquaintances? Did anybody know about the pregnancies? These are the questions we’re trying to answer,” Jud told Graz’s Kleine Zeitung newspaper.

Siegfried Koeppel, a police official in charge of the murder investigation, said the woman would not say during questioning how many babies she has had.

Koeppel told the newspaper that while the two bodies sealed in cement could not be autopsied, a coroner was able to determine that the remains bore no signs of fractured bones.

The woman’s companion has insisted he was unaware of the pregnancies and played no role in either the deaths or the disposal of the bodies, but authorities say they don’t believe it was possible because of the sheer number of births. The two lived together for eight years.

If tried and convicted of murder, the woman theoretically could face at least 10 years in prison - Austria’s minimum standard sentence for homicide. Austria has no death penalty.

Prosecutors in the province of Styria, where Graz is the regional capital, suggested Monday she could face a lesser sentence, noting that the punishment for killing a newborn baby is five years’ imprisonment.