A mother who killed five of her children has been handed a lifetime jail sentence in Germany.
The woman, identified only as Christiane K., was branded particularly ‘malicious’ after being sentenced for murdering all but one of her kids on Thursday.
Prosecutors said the 28-year-old acted out of anger last year after seeing a photo of her estranged husband with a new girlfriend.
Christiane K. had been found guilty of drowning or smothering the youngsters in the bath at the family flat in the city of Solingen.
The bodies of her three daughters – aged one, two and three – and two sons aged six and eight were found lying on their beds, each wrapped in a towel.
The woman then attempted to die by suicide following the September 2020 incident.
But she was rescued while trying to throw herself in front of a train at Duesseldorf station, and did not suffer life-threatening injuries.
Her sixth child, a boy who was 11 at the time, survived the grim ordeal because he was at school.
Prosecutors alleged that the mother mixed medication into the children’s breakfast drinks to make them sleepy, before killing them.
They said Christiane K. had taken advantage of her children’s innocence and defencelessness during the ‘malicious murders’.
Judges at the court in Wuppertal, western Germany, said the woman would not be eligible for parole for 15 years.
Prosecutors alleged that the defendant had told her estranged husband in an online chat that he would never see his children again.
Christiane K. had insisted she was innocent and said a masked man entered the flat and killed the children.
But investigators found no evidence to support the claim, and judges dismissed the defence’s request for an acquittal.
Court-appointed psychological experts determined that the accused could be held criminally responsible for her actions.
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