A 25-YEAR-OLD Dutch woman has been arrested after the bodies of four infants were found in the attic of her home in a rural town in the Netherlands.
Police searched the woman’s home in Nij Beets in the Friesland province of the country after a tip off from a neighbour. Suspicions had been raised when the woman appeared to be pregnant but then never seemed to have given birth.
Police found four suitcases in the attic of the house the woman shared with her parents. Police immediately identified the bodies of three infants in three of the suitcases; a forth body was later confirmed to be in the remaining suitcase.
It has not been established if the babies were alive when they were born. Police believe that the births took place between 2002 and 2010.
The woman’s parents are not thought to have had any knowledge about the pregnancies or the births.
At a press conference, police commissioner Wim van Essen said that the woman “Could not give a plausible explanation over the pregnancies and the babies that were born. She was then arrested on August 4th in consultation with the public prosecution as a suspect and a search was conducted in the parental home.”
A Dutch woman who drowned four of her newborn children was jailed and required to undergo psychological treatment in 2006.
The cases echoes that of French woman Dominique Cottrez, who last month confessed to suffocating eight of her newborn babies.
Similarly, the high-profile trials of Frenchwomen Céline Lesage in 2007 and Véronique Courjault in 2010 found that the women had killed their newborns.
The women were suspected of suffering from a psychological illness called pregnancy denial.
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