German police discovered the badly decomposed bodies of three newborn infants following a tip from the estranged husband of a 36-year-old woman, authorities said on Monday.
The woman, a postal worker whose name has not been released, was arrested in the town of Neuendorf in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, after the bodies were found in her house.
The bodies of an infant boy and girl were found wrapped up in the attic of her home, while skeletal remains of a third infant were found in a trash can, said Joachim Albrecht, a spokesman for police in nearby Stendal.
An autopsy was being performed in Hanover to try and determine the gender of the third infant and the cause and time of death for all three, Albrecht said.
The woman has not been able to say when the babies were born or how they died, and lead prosecutor Uta Wilkmann said she was believed to be "mentally disturbed" and was being held in hospital for observation.
Authorities were considering possible charges on three counts of manslaughter with diminished capacity, Wilkmann said.
The woman's 46-year-old husband, from whom she had been separated since October, discovered one of the bodies when he visited on Saturday to pick up some of his personal belongings.
He asked his wife about a smell coming from a box in the attic, then later observed her coming from the attic with a package and putting it in the garbage can.
He later opened the package with a friend and found "the severely decayed human remains," Wilkmann said.
When the woman saw what was happening, she jumped in her car and fled, but was taken into custody by police a short time later after the husband reported the find.
It was not immediately clear whether the husband, whose name was not released, was the father of the infants.
He told police he was the father of the woman's two-year-old son. The two-year-old and the woman's other child, a 17-year-old boy, have both been taken into state care.
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