'Mother killers' shock Germany
2007-12-06 20:12
Berlin - Germany was in shock on Thursday after the deaths of eight children, apparently killed by their mothers in two cases that have fuelled a debate about how children are raised in the country.
A 31-year-old single mother was placed in psychiatric care after her five boys, aged between three and nine, were found dead in her house in the tiny northern town of Darry near Kiel on Wednesday.
The grim discovery came hours after police announced the arrest of an unemployed 28-year-old mother in Plauen in the eastern state of Saxony on suspicion of killing three newborn babies shortly after giving birth to them.
In the Darry case, "We think that she gave them tranquillisers and then suffocated them with plastic bags," police commissioner Juergen Boerner told N-TV television on Thursday.
"We think the motive for the killing could be found in the mother's psychiatric illness," he added.
As police searched for evidence, visibly upset neighbours gathered on Thursday at the spacious brown-brick home where the children were found.
?I hope they didn?t suffer?
"I hope they did not suffer too much," a crying 64-year-old resident of Darry told reporters.
The neighbours said the family had only moved to the town of fewer than 500 people about three months ago.
According to the local press, the bodies were found after welfare officials went to the house on Wednesday because the children had been absent from school.
Their teachers had reportedly remarked that the boys looked neglected and had been coming to school in the winter cold without coats.
In the Plauen case, police said they detained the woman after finding a baby's body in a trunk in a cellar at her flat a week ago, but released her after failing to find evidence that the child had died violently.
She was re-arrested after they discovered two more bodies, both wrapped in plastic, on the balcony and in the fridge.
The children, all girls, were born in 2002, 2004 and 2005.
Bernd Vogel, a prosecutor in the eastern city of Chemnitz, said autopsies were being done to establish their cause of death.
He said there were no clear signs that the children had died violently, but added: "It is highly improbable that they all died of natural causes directly after birth."
The woman has two other children, both boys, and has denied killing the baby girls.
Remains found in flowerpots
The fate of the newborn babies recalled the country's worst post-war infanticide case in which an unemployed dental assistant suffering from cancer was sentenced to 15 years in jail last year.
She was convicted of manslaughter for leaving eight newborn babies to die. Police found their remains hidden in buckets and flowerpots in which the woman had planted vegetables.
In November this year, a 35-year-old woman from Erfurt in central Germany was jailed for 12 years for killing two of her babies and hiding their bodies in a freezer.
The ongoing debate in Germany about the plight of children in impoverished families intensified last month when a five-year-old died of starvation in the care of her parents, who now face murder charges.
The death of the little girl, identified only as Lea-Sophie, sparked calls for children's rights to be enshrined in the constitution in a bid to stem the tide of abuse cases.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed shock at the plight of Lea-Sophie, who weighed 7.4kg when she died, less than half the norm for a healthy five-year-old.
The independent welfare organisation Deutsche Kinderhilfe Direkt said on Thursday the deaths of the eight children found in Darry and Plauen this week "are not regrettable isolated cases" but point to "a crisis" in German society.
"We live in a society where nobody looks around them and where children are not cherished," the chairperson of the organisation, Georg Ehrmann, told Bayerische Rundfunk radio.