In September 2020, five small children died in an apartment in Wuppertal. The 28-year-old mother is an urgent suspect.
Wuppertal (dpa) – At the beginning of the trial for the murder of five small children in Solingen (North Rhine-Westphalia), the accused mother of the children at the Wuppertal district court was silent. Her defense lawyers announced on Monday that she would not testify to the matter or to her person.
Instead, the lawyers turned down the trial’s psychiatric reviewer. Her client did not exempt him from medical confidentiality, instead he “fooled” her into partial confidentiality and thus deceived her.
In addition, he did not even inquire about relevant investigations against the defendant’s father, let alone inspect the files.
In a preliminary statement, the expert had not found any mental illnesses in the 28-year-old mother. The German threatens life imprisonment.
According to public prosecutor Heribert Kaune-Gebhardt, she had given her children “high doses” of a mixture of three drugs and thus “deliberately brought them into a state of twilight” in order to reduce their resistance.
One by one, she took her children to the bathroom and strangled, suffocated or drowned in the bathtub. Then she wrapped each child in towels and put them in a cot.
The children’s bodies were discovered on September 3 last year: Melina (1), Leonie (2), Sophie (3), Timo (6) and Luca (8). Her mother threw herself in front of a train after the crime in Düsseldorf Central Station, but survived. Her eldest son survived unharmed. His mother had sent him to see his grandmother in the Lower Rhine region.
So far, the German had protested her innocence: a masked stranger broke into her apartment and killed her children. For this version, however, no traces or starting points were discovered, a spokesman for the prosecutor had said.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210614-99-987827 / 3
