GERMANY:POLICE ARE questioning a woman (44) in western Germany accused of hiding three dead babies in her freezer for 20 years.
The latest shocking infanticide case in Germany came to light on Saturday evening when the woman's 18-year-old son went looking in the freezer for something to eat.
At the bottom of the chest freezer he saw a small face and arm, wrapped in a bloodsoaked hand towel and a newspaper from 1988.
He confronted his parents and they contacted the police, who have sealed off the half-timber family home in Siegen, near Düsseldorf in Germany's western Sauerland region.
The mother of three children - 18, 23 and 25 - has been taken into custody, police said, but is in "no condition" to be questioned.
"We can give no information as yet about the condition of the bodies, nor the way in which the newborns died," said Herbert Fingerhut, head of the investigation.
All were born alive and at least one had been hidden in the freezer since 1988, he said.
He declined to comment on speculation that the statute of limitations on possible prosecutions had already passed.
Initial questioning had revealed the woman was "frequently pregnant", he said, but that her "corpulent figure" sometimes made it difficult to tell.
Barely a month goes by in Germany without a new case of infanticide being reported. In the most high-profile case, an eastern German woman received a 15-year sentence last year for killing nine newborn babies and hiding their remains in flower pots.
A prominent eastern politician was attacked for suggesting that women raised in the communist East were more likely to kill their children because of their "casual approach" to life.
Yesterday's discovery proved that, in Germany, infanticide is a nationwide epidemic.