BERLIN, Dec 6: A mentally-ill woman in Germany has confessed to killing her five sons, authorities said on Thursday, two days after another mother was arrested in connection with the death of three newborns.

Police in the northern hamlet of Darry found the bodies of the five boys, aged three to nine, on Wednesday after their 31-year-old mother admitted to a psychiatrist that she had killed them, said the head of the police investigation, Stefan Winkler.“ She said she had killed them with an overdose of tranquilisers,” Winkler told a press conference.

Social workers had been counselling the family since August after they were called in by a concerned neighbour, but did not foresee the tragedy, a member of the regional municipal council said.

“We were aware of a severe crisis in the woman’s relationship with her husband. She appeared to be gripped by religious fantasies,” Volkran Gebel told reporters.

“We followed the case closely and visited the home. Conditions appeared relatively normal, there was laundry in the washing machine. Nothing gave the social workers cause to suspect that the mother would take her children’s lives.” Investigators said the woman’s current husband, who is the father of three of the children, lived with them until Tuesday but had complained about his wife’s condition.

Both he and her first husband, the father of the two eldest boys, were being treated for shock after learning of the deaths.

Police commissioner Juergen Boerner said the children also appeared to have been smothered with plastic bags. Preliminary autopsy results indicated they had died of suffocation.

“We think the motive for the killing could be found in the mother’s psychiatric illness,” Boerner said simply while officers searched the brown-brick house in Darry.

On Tuesday, police arrested an unemployed 28-year-old mother in Plauen in the eastern state of Saxony on suspicion of killing three babies shortly after giving birth to them. The woman, who also has two other children, has denied the charges.—AFP