Dutch police said on Friday they had arrested a 25-year-old woman on suspicion of killing four of her babies over an eight-year period, echoing a similar case in France last week.
Authorities said they searched the woman’s house in a rural village in the north of the Netherlands and found four suitcases in the attic, each containing the remains of babies. Initially, only three bodies had been confirmed to have been found.
Police say suspicions were raised when a resident alerted police, saying there was uncertainty about the births.
The woman had said she gave the children up for adoption, but later confessed to putting their bodies in suitcases.
“She could not give a plausible explanation over the pregnancies and the babies that were born. She was then arrested on [Wednesday] in consultation with the public prosecution as a suspect and a search was conducted in the parental home,” police commissioner Wim van Essen said at a news conference.
It is not clear whether the babies — born between 2002 and this year — were born alive, said Leeuwarden prosecutor Annette Bronsvoort at the news conference, held at the Leeuwarden court.
The police commissioner said the woman’s parents, who live at the same address, had been moved out of the house while the police search continued. The parents say they were not aware of the pregnancies and are not suspects in the case, police said.
The case comes just a week after a 47-year-old woman in France confessed to suffocating eight of her new-borns and hiding their bodies.
Nij Beets is a small, tree-lined village in the heart of the quieter, rural north of the Netherlands.
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