The bodies of five babies, including four hidden in a freezer, were discovered in a house in southern France after a man told police officers he found the corpse of a baby in a cooler bag in his home, a senior police official said on Friday.
Police union UNSA spokesman Christophe Crepin said the discovery of the babies’ bodies came to light on Thursday when the man, a 40-year-old farmer, contacted the police after he discovered a newborn’s body in an isothermal bag at his family’s home in Louchats, a rural village about 30.5km south of Bordeaux. After the police searched the home, they discovered four other corpses of babies in a large freezer, he said.
Crepin said the man had been detained and was being questioned, while his wife, age 35, had been taken to the hospital to undergo psychological and gynecological examinations. The couple have daughters aged 13 and 15.
Police officers said they were still investigating the mysterious deaths and were considering several possibilities including possible infanticide, whether the babies had been stillborn or whether the mother had been suffering from a condition in which women deny they are pregnant.
Agence France-Presse reported that the initial findings of the investigation appeared to suggest that the mother, who worked at a garden nursery, had given birth to a baby alone in the couple’s house. It said the woman had been seen by neighbors in their sleepy village as recently as three weeks ago and did not appear pregnant.
News reports said the man had told the police that he had not known his wife was pregnant.
It is not the first time that France has been shaken by the discovery of dead babies.
In 2010, the bodies of eight newborn babies were found buried in the garden of a home in Villers-au-Tertre. Their mother, Dominique Cottrez, told officials that she had killed them, because she believed they were the product of incest.
That followed a case in 2006 when Jean-Louis Courjault, a French engineer who was living in Seoul, South Korea, discovered the corpses of two newborn babies in his freezer. His wife, Veronique Courjault, was sentenced in June 2009 to eight years in prison for killing three of her babies and was freed in May 2010.
The police said autopsies would be carried out on the Louchats bodies on Friday.
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