LibriumArcana.Games

German police are holding a woman suspected of manslaughter after the bodies of nine new-born babies were found buried in a garden.

The 39-year-old woman is believed to be the mother of the children found in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, in Brandenburg state, near the border with Poland.

Police officers with sniffer dogs were searching the site for further remains.

The grim discovery of little bodies found buried in flower pots and buckets has shocked Germany.

It is thought that the babies were born, and died, between 1988 and 2004.

"We are looking at a crime on a scale that, as far as I can remember, has never been seen in the history of the Federal Republic," Brandenburg Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm said in a statement.

Flower pot near garage
Police are searching the property for further remains

"We have to ask ourselves how this incredible crime remained hidden over all these years. It's a question directed at relatives, neighbours, doctors and the authorities."

The bodies were discovered after someone clearing a garage at the site found human bones stored in a fish tank, police said.

According to Reuters, the woman has said she was the mother of the babies but has not admitted killing them. A court spokesman said her statement was confused.

Other discoveries

The woman has been identified in the German press only as Sabine H. She is reported to be a jobless dental assistant who moved from the house, where her mother and eldest sister live, to nearby Frankfurt an der Oder.

Bild newspaper said she met her first boyfriend, a former East German army officer and Stasi employee, when she was 17 and they had a daughter in 1984. She had two more children in the following two years.


Sabine was quite a normal girl, not stupid at all
Neighbour Ulrich Heitmann

Berliner Zeitung says she has lived for several years in Frankfurt an der Oder with a man who is the father of her youngest child, 18-month-old Elisabeth. Three other children - aged 18, 19 and 20 - live with her first husband.

Neighbour Ulrich Heitmann, 69, told the newspaper: "Sabine was quite a normal girl, not stupid at all".

The finds come after other recent grim discoveries in Germany, says the Associated Press.

Last week, a dead baby girl was found in a public toilet in Magdeburg and a young boy was discovered on a recycling company's conveyer belt in Guetersloh.

A walker in Lower Saxony found a dead baby in a plastic bag in June.

The authorities in Austria are holding the parents of at least three of four children whose bodies were found in a freezer and concrete-filled buckets at their home.

BBC wrote: Baby remains find shocks France

All relevant French hospitals will now be checked
Remains of 351 stillborn babies and foetuses have been found in the mortuary room of a well-known hospital in the French capital, Paris.
Some of the tiny bodies had been kept against regulations at St Vincent de Paul for up to 25 years and the government has ordered an inquiry.

Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said his ministry would try to find out why and how it had been allowed to happen.

All French maternity hospitals linked to mortuaries will also be checked.

The public prosecutor's office in Paris has opened its own investigation into the case.

Incineration policy

Announcing the grisly find, Xavier Bertrand said he was sad and indignant.

"I want to share my deep emotion and indignation at this discovery," he said after visiting the hospital in southern Paris.

"This situation demands that we find the truth."

French health ministry guidelines require that hospitals incinerate stillborn babies whose bodies are not claimed by relatives within 10 days, Liberation newspaper reports.

The BBC's Caroline Wyatt reports from Paris that French commentators suspect similarities to the Alder Hey scandal in the British city of Liverpool.

Parents there discovered that the remains of their children had been kept by the hospital without their consent.