Mother ‘killed her two newborn babies born a year apart and kept their bodies in her freezer’
A woman in South Korea has been arrested on charges of strangling two of her young children and keeping their bodies in her freezer since they were born.
The 30-year-old mother, who has not been named, reportedly took her babies’ lives one day after their births in November 2018 and 2019.
Police said they kept them in plastic bags in a freezer after discovering the horror during an investigation in the northwestern city of Suwon on Wednesday.
In a tragic twist, the mother of three told police that she had chosen to kill her children because she could not afford to care for them.
According to police, both children appear to have been killed a day after they were born, one at home and the other near the hospital where the mother gave birth.
Image shows Gyeonggi Provincial Policy Agency building. Police arrested mother accused of killing her children after investigating unregistered children in Suwon
According to the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police, the woman had told her husband that she had aborted the children.
Through his lawyer, he said he was unaware of the crime and apologized for doing nothing to stop her: “I knew my wife was pregnant, but I didn’t know she killed the babies.” I trusted her when she told me she had an abortion.
“I’m sorry I didn’t protect the babies. I suspected something was wrong when the police recently investigated my wife, but I didn’t think she had done anything like that.
“I couldn’t protect the babies and I think it’s a crime that I didn’t know something like this was happening. I’m so sorry about the babies.”
But he remains a suspect in an ongoing investigation into the case.
Police are currently detaining the woman and plan to apply for an arrest warrant after their investigation, police said participation.
The couple live in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, a city in northwestern South Korea.
They work in a call center and have three other children aged eight, ten and twelve.
The murders came to light during a wider investigation into missing children in South Korea.
Local authorities were forced to urgently find 20 missing children after it was revealed that 2,000 births since 2015 have gone unrecorded.
She had initially refused an attempt by the municipality to inspect their home.
In another case, a baby born in Changwon, South Gyeonsang in 2022 died of malnutrition 76 days after birth.
Others had been found abandoned in so-called ‘baby boxes’.
Infanticide and the abandonment of young children are serious problems that affect the country.
Parents’ preference for a boy has led some to abandon children in ‘baby boxes’, sparking social debate – but no meaningful policy changes in recent years.
Income inequality and poverty are also worrying factors influencing parents’ decisions to end their children’s lives.
The South Korean Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, is arranged medium.
Where a value of 0 represents full equality and a value of 1 represents full inequality, South Korea got a value from 0.331 in 2020.
In comparison, Great Britain received a value of 0.355 in the same year.
Research infanticide and poverty in South Korea has shown that just a percentage increase in the unemployment rate significantly increases the risk of infanticide within half a year.
Between 2003 and 2017, there were a total of 205 child homicides in South Korea.
The number of child murders peaked between 2009 and 2011, fluctuated until 2014 and increased sharply in 2015.
Researchers linked economic turmoil to a higher number of infanticides.
Suwon, a city south of the Korean capital Seoul, where a mother was arrested after allegedly killing two of her young children, saying she couldn’t afford to care for them
Last August, President Yook Suk-yeol said he would take action to care for struggling citizens after a family was found dead at home in Suwon.
A mother and her two daughters were found dead in apparent suicides after reportedly struggling with illness and financial problems.
The president said at the time: “I have told the people so far that when it comes to welfare, which is the basis of freedom and solidarity, I would pursue welfare for the weak instead of welfare for the political, and meet the weak they are unable to express their difficulties with one voice and manage their difficult life.’
The mother was in her sixties and the two daughters in her forties.