Two parents killed their children in separate cases over Christmas, German police said on Wednesday, the latest of a series of infanticides that have shocked the country and forced the government to act to improve child-welfare and social services.
In one, a father killed his eight-year-old son before committing suicide whilst a second incident saw a mother confess to killing her two toddler sons, said police in the southern state of Bavaria, where both incidents took place.
The first case saw a 43-year old computer programmer in Munich kill his son before suffocating himself with a plastic bag on the child's bed in what appeared to be a row with his divorced wife over custody access, according to police.
The bodies were found on Christmas day.
In the second a mother admitted to killing her infant sons after the grandmother found the children, aged two and three, dead in the bath, said police. Their mother was sitting in another room.
Officers arrested the 37-year-old mother on Christmas Day in the town of Beratzhausen, near Regensburg. The children's faces and necks bore signs of violence.
The mother had already confessed to the killings but had so far offered no explanation, said police. She was due to appear in court on Wednesday.
The father, 45, who was at work at the time the children were killed, has been ruled out as a suspect.
The two cases are the latest in a series of recent infanticides that have shocked Germany and prompted a series of federal measures to improve social services and child welfare.
Last Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel approved a raft of measures to protect families, at a crisis meeting over a series of grisly child murders at the hands of parents.
Merkel and the leaders of Germany's 16 states approved a plan of action allowing the authorities to take swifter action when child neglect or abuse are suspected. The new package also requires regular checkups for babies and toddlers and obliges doctors to report suspicious cases.
A national database of records on child welfare is also planned, compiling information from health care providers, child protection services, social welfare offices, family courts and the police.
Earlier this month police found the bodies of five brothers, aged three to nine, in a home in Darry after their 31-year-old mother confessed to a psychiatrist that she had killed them.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver