A FRENCH couple were in custody last night after police found the buried corpses of eight newborn babies in a village in the north of the country.
The local prosecutor said the presumed parents, both aged 45, were being held after the bodies were discovered in two locations in Villers-au-Tertre, south of Lille, earlier this week.
They are expected to be formally placed under investigation this morning.
“We found the corpses of eight newborn babies in two different locations in Villers-au-Tertre,” the local prosecutor, Eric Vaillant, told Reuters.
“Two people are in custody. They are the mother and father of the children.”
According to French radio, the arrested woman – a mother of two – told police that the corpses are those of two newborn babies to whom she gave birth in secret. RTL said she had admitted killing “a dozen” others since 1988, and kept her actions from her husband.
Local residents told French media that the new owners of a house in the village alerted police last Saturday after finding what they believed were the remains of two newborn babies in the garden of their new home while gardening.
They were later confirmed as human remains, and a subsequent police search led to the discovery of more corpses in a different house less than a kilometre away, according to the same sources.
A number of streets in Villers-au-Tertre, a small commune of several hundred residents, remained closed last night as forensics teams and sniffer dog units continued their work. Police have not ruled out finding more bodies.
France has had a series of high-profile cases in recent years in which parents have killed their newborn babies. One mother, Céline Lesage, was sentenced to 15 years in prison last March for suffocating or strangling six of her newborn babies between 2000 and 2007.
Her crimes came to light in October 2007 when the father of one of the dead babies discovered a decomposing corpse in a rubbish bag in their cellar in the Manche department in northwestern France.
Mrs Lesage (38) confessed to concealing the pregnancies, then giving birth alone before strangling two infants and suffocating four others.
She told the court that she could not explain why she had killed the babies.
Another woman, Véronique Courjault, was released from prison last May, having been convicted for killing three of her newborn children between 1999 and 2003.
Ms Courjault’s husband found two of the corpses in a freezer while the couple were living in Seoul, South Korea.
There have also been similar cases in Germany. In one, a woman was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents’ home near the German-Polish border.
– (Additional reporting Guardian service/AP)