France : three babies frozen discovered, the mother admitted to having strangled

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AFP

Thursday, 13 July, 2017 13:18

UPDATE
Thursday, 13 July, 2017 15:35

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Two days after the discovery of three babies frozen in Lorient, a 50 year-old woman, who confessed to the investigators to be their mother and have stifled in their birth, has been charged with murder and placed in detention.

This woman has been “indicted (charged, editor’s note) to the chief of the assassination and placed in provisional detention,” said AFP the prosecutor of the Republic of Lorient Laureline Peyrefitte

The babies have been kept more than a dozen years in a freezer.

“The first scientific investigations suggest, subject to the results of the autopsy scheduled for this day of the three infants and medical examinations complementary, that these children were born alive,” said Thursday the prosecutor of the Republic of Lorient Laureline Peyrefitte during a press conference.

“At this stage of the investigation, the respondent indicates in its first statements that she gave birth each time in her former home, ( … ), the only dates that she is in 1998, 1999, and 2003”.

Just after these births, the mother would have proceeded “according to an operating mode : to stifle the new-born with the aid of a cushion before you wrap them in a plastic bag and put them in his freezer,” added the prosecutor.

According to the first elements of the investigation, the three children were the fruit of a relationship with a man encountered in the professional setting and now retired.

“The latter would have ignored the statements of pregnancies successive, in this case, a condition which would not have been detected either by its surroundings to it,” said the prosecutor.

A judicial inquiry will be opened “in the coming hours, the head of murder, she faces up to life imprisonment,” said Ms. Peyrefitte.

This business of babies killed at birth adding to a long list of precedent in France.

The best known is the case Courjault. On July 23, 2006, Jean-Louis Courjault discovers the bodies of two newborn babies in his freezer in Seoul. His wife Véronique is prison on 12 October in France. Having admitted to another infanticide committed in 1999, she was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2009, but released the year following.

The most important case of this type occurred in 2015 in the Gironde : the bodies of five babies had been discovered by her partner at the home of a 35 year old woman, in a small village.