|
Cops visit infanticide home
13/02/2007 10:08 - (SA)
Seoul - French police investigating a triple infanticide case were on Tuesday to visit the Seoul house where the two of the babies' bodies were found in a freezer, South Korean police said.
The officers will also question a maid who worked at the house and the neighbours, a police spokesperson said.
Investigating magistrate Marie-Dominique Boulard-Paolini is spending a week in South Korea while the three police officers accompanying her are staying for about two weeks, prosecutor Philippe Varin told AFP in France last week.
French national Veronique Courjault, 38, has confessed to killing three babies she gave birth to between 1999 and 2003.
She is now in jail in France under criminal investigation for murder, the first stage before formal charges are brought.
The cases came to light when her 40-year-old husband Jean-Louis found the bodies of two babies in the freezer of their Seoul home last July and alerted police.
"The investigators will question members of the entourage of the Courjault couple in Seoul and make arrangements to repatriate the bodies of the two babies back to France," said Varin.
After nearly three months of denying any knowledge of the babies in Seoul, Veronique Courjault in October admitted killing them and an earlier infant, according to French police and her lawyer.
Her confession followed DNA tests by South Korean and French police which showed the couple were the babies' parents.
Husband not aware of births
Jean-Louis Courjault, 41, who worked for the US car parts company Delphi in South Korea, says he knew nothing about the infants. He has also been placed under investigation in France for aiding and abetting murder but has not been detained.
French media reports citing investigators have said Veronique, who already has two sons aged 10 and 11, committed the crimes because she did not want more children.
In 1999, while still in France, she allegedly shielded her pregnancy from her husband and gave birth to a boy whom she suffocated and whose body she burnt in the fireplace of her family home.
In 2002 the Courjaults moved to South Korea. There, she allegedly confessed to secretly giving birth to a second boy who she also suffocated.
The following year, according to her confession, she again gave birth. She suffocated the baby and put his body in the same freezer next to his brother.
- AFP
|
News
