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BERLIN - A 31-year-old mother was being held in a psychiatric hospital in northern Germany yesterday on suspicion of having killed her five sons aged between three and nine by feeding them sleeping pills and then suffocating them with plastic bags.
Police called at the woman's home in the town of Darry in Schleswig-Holstein late after a psychiatrist reported that she had confessed to drugging her sons.
They said they found the boys' corpses in different rooms in the two-storey family house.
State prosecutors said initial results of a post-mortem examination had shown that the boys had been asphyxiated.
"Evidence so far suggests that the deaths occurred as a result of the mother's mental illness," they said in a statement.
"We cannot rule out that the boys were also given drugs," they added.
Yesterday, weeping parents escorted their children to the small provincial town's primary school, where the boys had been pupils. Classes were cancelled. Instead a team of child psychologists and the town's pastor were on hand to provide counselling.
Parents said the father of three of the boys was an American citizen, who appeared to get on well with all of them although he lived elsewhere.
Their mother was reported to be "very withdrawn" and had moved to the town only three months beforehand. This was the latest in a series of crimes involving children in Germany over the past two years.
On Wednesday, state prosecutors in eastern Germany placed a 28-year-old woman under arrest after police discovered the bodies of her three baby daughters in the city of Plauen.
One of the bodies was found in a suitcase. The other two were concealed in a deep freeze on the woman's balcony.
She has denied any responsibility for her children's deaths.
- THE INDEPENDENT
