Post by limestpimp on May 3, 2006 14:35:19 GMT -1
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-2155216,00.html
currently happening in Germany, absolutely unbelievable........
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From Roger Boyes in Berlin
A 40-YEAR-OLD mother who allegedly buried her nine dead babies in flowerpots refused to answer charges of manslaughter yesterday, as a German court opened proceedings in the worst case of infanticide in the country since the Second World War.
Sabine H — whose full name cannot be given for legal reasons — shook her head vigorously when she was asked to give evidence at the start of the trial that is gripping Germany.
Judge Matthias Fuchs then dispassionately read out the extraordinary story of the dental technician who is accused of letting nine of her thirteen children die soon after birth. The stunned court was told how Frau H drank herself into a stupor to still the pain of the secret births. “As a result I can remember only two of them,” Frau H told police after her arrest last year.
She gave birth on a lavatory in 1988. “I will never forget her blue face and the little drops of foam on her lip,” she said in evidence read out in court yesterday. A second birth, in 1992, took place in a hotel room in the town of Goslar. A colleague entered the room shortly after the birth and Frau H covered herself with a blanket and stuffed the baby out of view. It died shortly afterwards.
The two dead babies were allegedly buried in flowerpots on her balcony in Frankfurt an der Oder, a small city near the Polish border. She gave birth almost annually, and other baby bodies started to fill up the plant pots. It is alleged that Frau H took them all to her mother’s house in a small village south of the city. They were discovered last year by a relative who wanted to use an aquarium tank that was stored in the garage. He tipped out sand and found a skull.
The case has been troubling Germany ever since. Demonstrators outside the courtroom held up placards yesterday that read, “Tell the truth!” and “We mourn nine little children”. Why were her many pregnancies not noticed by neighbours? How could her former husband, the father of all the dead children, according to DNA tests, not have recognised a problem.
“I thought that she had a weight problem,” Oliver H said in a police interrogation. Yesterday he, too, refused to answer questions in court. Politicians have been arguing how a woman in need could fall unnoticed through the elaborate German social welfare network.
Jörg Schönbohm, a leading conservative, courted controversy by suggesting that society in the former East Germany had been brutalised by decades of communist rule. Three times as many babies have been found dead in eastern Germany as in western Germany in the past decade.
Frau H told police that her husband did not want more children, so she had to hide her pregnancies to save her relationship. She has confessed to the two early deaths. The 1988 death can no longer be prosecuted because it falls outside the statute of limitations for manslaughter. If found guilty of causing the death of the second child, Frau H could expect a mild sentence. The maximum is 15 years in jail, but Frau H’s medical circumstances would probably be taken into consideration. Doctors have recently diagnosed cancer.
She is said to be intelligent, vivacious and a good mother to her three first children, who are young adults. Somehow, from 1988, she entered a pattern of concealed childbirth. “I would sit on the balcony and talk to them in the flowerpots,” she told police. There is a question of how Frau H snapped out of her alleged behaviour. She has had a child — her thirteenth — with a new boyfriend. The two-year-old is alive and well.
currently happening in Germany, absolutely unbelievable........
**************************************************************
From Roger Boyes in Berlin
A 40-YEAR-OLD mother who allegedly buried her nine dead babies in flowerpots refused to answer charges of manslaughter yesterday, as a German court opened proceedings in the worst case of infanticide in the country since the Second World War.
Sabine H — whose full name cannot be given for legal reasons — shook her head vigorously when she was asked to give evidence at the start of the trial that is gripping Germany.
Judge Matthias Fuchs then dispassionately read out the extraordinary story of the dental technician who is accused of letting nine of her thirteen children die soon after birth. The stunned court was told how Frau H drank herself into a stupor to still the pain of the secret births. “As a result I can remember only two of them,” Frau H told police after her arrest last year.
She gave birth on a lavatory in 1988. “I will never forget her blue face and the little drops of foam on her lip,” she said in evidence read out in court yesterday. A second birth, in 1992, took place in a hotel room in the town of Goslar. A colleague entered the room shortly after the birth and Frau H covered herself with a blanket and stuffed the baby out of view. It died shortly afterwards.
The two dead babies were allegedly buried in flowerpots on her balcony in Frankfurt an der Oder, a small city near the Polish border. She gave birth almost annually, and other baby bodies started to fill up the plant pots. It is alleged that Frau H took them all to her mother’s house in a small village south of the city. They were discovered last year by a relative who wanted to use an aquarium tank that was stored in the garage. He tipped out sand and found a skull.
The case has been troubling Germany ever since. Demonstrators outside the courtroom held up placards yesterday that read, “Tell the truth!” and “We mourn nine little children”. Why were her many pregnancies not noticed by neighbours? How could her former husband, the father of all the dead children, according to DNA tests, not have recognised a problem.
“I thought that she had a weight problem,” Oliver H said in a police interrogation. Yesterday he, too, refused to answer questions in court. Politicians have been arguing how a woman in need could fall unnoticed through the elaborate German social welfare network.
Jörg Schönbohm, a leading conservative, courted controversy by suggesting that society in the former East Germany had been brutalised by decades of communist rule. Three times as many babies have been found dead in eastern Germany as in western Germany in the past decade.
Frau H told police that her husband did not want more children, so she had to hide her pregnancies to save her relationship. She has confessed to the two early deaths. The 1988 death can no longer be prosecuted because it falls outside the statute of limitations for manslaughter. If found guilty of causing the death of the second child, Frau H could expect a mild sentence. The maximum is 15 years in jail, but Frau H’s medical circumstances would probably be taken into consideration. Doctors have recently diagnosed cancer.
She is said to be intelligent, vivacious and a good mother to her three first children, who are young adults. Somehow, from 1988, she entered a pattern of concealed childbirth. “I would sit on the balcony and talk to them in the flowerpots,” she told police. There is a question of how Frau H snapped out of her alleged behaviour. She has had a child — her thirteenth — with a new boyfriend. The two-year-old is alive and well.