German mother admits to killing seven of her infants

A 45-year-old woman in Germany has admitted to killing seven of eight toddlers, whose corpses were discovered at an apartment in the northeast Bavarian town of Wallenfells.

Local police in the Upper Franconia administrative region announced in a Saturday statement that the yet unidentified woman confessed to murdering the infants after discovery of their bodies led to her detention in a village late Friday.

The development came after the local police announced that they responded to a tip on Thursday by a resident who reported that there was an infant’s body inside the apartment.

However, when officers reported to the scene, they found several other bodies of small children wrapped in hand towels and placed in plastic bags.

Subsequently, a local judge issued an arrest warrant for the woman arrested on suspicion of seven counts of murder. Police added that they released a 55-year-old man accompanying the suspect without charge.

The authorities stated that forensic examinations of the corpses may take some time “due to the poor condition” of some bodies, with no result expected before early next week.

Investigators are yet to determine how the small children had died and who their father is.

This is while the major German daily Bild reported that a former resident of the apartment had lived there with her husband for 18 years, and that the couple had three children.

It further added that she also had four more children from other relationships, noting that she had tried to conceal her frequent pregnancies. The daily also cited an unnamed source as saying that the woman had gone through four miscarriages.

According to the newspaper, she moved out of the apartment in late September following a quarrel with her spouse. It added that she had spoken about hiding infant bodies at her apartment while drunk. The claim was overheard by a neighbor, who began looking for the bodies and informed police after she made the gruesome discovery.

Germany has been witnessing a number of similar cases in recent years. In May, a woman was sentenced to only 44 months in prison after murdering two of her children and then hiding their bodies in a freezer.

In October 2013, construction workers in Bavaria discovered the bodies of two infants, dead since the 1980s.

Also in 2008, a 42-year-old woman was convicted of murdering eight of her newborn babies and then concealing their corpses in buckets, flower pots, and an old fish tank.