A 28-year-old German mother who murdered five of her six children after seeing a picture of her former partner with his new girlfriend has been given a life sentence.
The mother, identified only as Christiane K, first sedated her children and then either drowned or suffocated them at their home in the western city of Solingen in September last year.
The lifeless bodies of Melina, Leonie, Sophie, Timo, and Luca, all aged between one and eight years old were found covered and in their beds.
According to the investigators, the woman was angered after receiving a photo from the father of her children with his new lover.
The woman reportedly replied to the ex-partner that he would never see his children again, German news agency DPA reported.
The woman sent her eldest child to stay with his grandmother before committing the murders.
She then tried to kill herself by jumping in front of a speeding train at the Duesseldorf railway station. The woman suffered serious injuries and was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.
During the trial, the woman alleged that an unidentified person had barged into their apartment, tied her up, and killed her children.
The regional court in Wuppertal found the mother guilty of the murders and established the particular gravity of her crimes.
Reading out the life sentence, Judge Jochen Kötter described the case as a "tragedy". The verdict means the woman cannot be released from prison at least for 15 years.
In a similar but unrelated incident, a mother from Missouri, who tried to kill herself by jumping off a bridge after drowning her own son in a bathtub and attempting to smother her other child to death with a pillow, received a life imprisonment sentence on Tuesday, Nov. 2.
34-year-old Aushena Warren killed her 8-year-old son Audrick and attempted to suffocate her 6-year-old son to death with a pillow in 2017.
According to her suicide note, Warren tried to kill her sons and herself due to financial hardships.
"I’m sorry. I love you guys... You’ll never understand this and nothing makes this acceptable...but I had to save the babies," she said in her note.
She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted assault.
"Life in prison was the only fair and just sentence," prosecutor Eric Zahnd said in court.
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