The authorities arrested this Wednesday the 32-year-old woman whose partner discovered five dead babies inside boxes in her apartment in Orange, southeastern France, the prosecutor’s office told AFP.
The discovery of the bones of four newborns and the body of a fifth occurred after the woman was transferred to a hospital on Sunday after giving birth at home, a pregnancy that her partner discovered «late,» according to authorities.
Justice opened an investigation for murder and this Wednesday arrested the woman, indicated the Carpentras prosecutor’s office, confirming an investigation by the newspaper Le Parisien.
According to the regional newspaper La Provence, the arrest occurred when the woman left the hospital.
The prosecutor’s office ordered the provisional fostering of the baby born on Sunday and reported to social services the situation of the couple’s other two minor children.
The couple also had two children, ages eight and nine, who attended the neighborhood primary school. Florent Jean, a neighbor consulted by the AFP agency, described a seemingly normal family routine. The mother «was going to pick them up from school at lunchtime to eat,» while her partner spent the day away working, he said.
On Tuesday, the door to the second-floor apartment was sealed with red tape. Several bicycles leaning against the stair railing were the only visible trace of that family’s daily life in the building.
Cases of homicides of babies at birth are not rare. Sometimes they are marked by an alteration in the mother’s discernment or by the denial of pregnancies, which are hidden from those around them.
In the most serious French case of infanticide, Dominique Cottrez was sentenced in 2015 to nine years in prison for killing eight newborns. The jury recognized in his case an alteration of discernment.
