LORIENT (AFP) – A 50-year-old French woman confessed Thursday to suffocating her three children at birth, two days after their bodies were discovered in a freezer.
The woman admitted being the mother of the children, suffocating them with a cushion, then wrapping their bodies in a plastic bag and placing them in the freezer, where they had spent up to a decade, prosecutor Laureline Peyrefitte said.
“First forensic investigations suggest, pending the results of an autopsy on the three babies and supplementary medical examinations, that the children were born alive,” said Peyrefitte.
Based on the mother’s testimony, she had given birth alone at her former home in the western city of Lorient in 1998, 1999 and again in 2003.
Each time she then “suffocated the newborns with a cushion before placing them in a plastic bag and putting them in the freezer,” according to Peyrefitte, who later said the woman has been charged with murder and placed in detention. She could face a life jail term for the killings.
According to police investigations, a now-retired former work colleague of the unnamed woman fathered all three infants.
