Mother arrested: babies in freezer

It's thought the babies bodies may have been stored there for up to 20 years, before they were reportedly found by the woman's teenage son.

With their parents away for the weekend in the Black Forest their 18-year- old son and 24-year-old daughter went to look for something to eat in the basement freezer. It was then that they made their dreadful discovery.

Police in Germany said: "The two of them decided to take a pizza out of the freezer and realised that it needed to be cleaned out as a lot of the food was out of date. They went downstairs and the son took some of the food away. He then opened the bags and discovered the bodies. He then put them back and waited until the parents came back."

The parents returned last night. Their children confronted them and then went to the local police station where their mother confessed that she'd had the three infants in secret. The babies who had died shortly after birth would have been in their late teens or early twenties if they'd survived.

Police said the mother, known as Monika, had disguised her pregnancies under large shapeless clothing and given birth in the bath.

They said the family was traumatized and in a state of shock. "The woman was sobbing and shaking when she made her statement," chief investigator Herbert Fingerhut told a news conference.

Police said none of the family members appeared to have known about the babies.

Neighbours expressed surprise that the husband had been unaware of his corpulent wife's three pregnancies.

Police said an autopsy was being carried out on the bodies.

The case is likely to spark questions about whether and how the disappearance of the babies went unnoticed by neighbours and by authorities.

The discovery of three tiny corpses last night has provoked more to ask how a woman can have had three children totally unnoticed in a neat and tidy middle class town.

It's not the first case of its kind in Germany.

Germany has been hit by an infanticide epidemic; with well over 100 officially recognised cases a year left at municipal rubbish tips, or dumps, inside skips or cardboard boxes.

Sabine Hilschenz was sentenced to 15 years in jail after killing eight of her babies and burying some of them in flower pots, buckets and fish tanks on her property.

Originally seen as an east German problem, it's now affecting the whole country, prompting the introduction of 76 baby hatches in hospitals across the country, where mothers who cannot cope can leave their infants without endangering their health.

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