MOTHER KILLS HER 5 CHILDREN IN BELGIUM
(AP)
Updated: 2007-03-01
10:06
BRUSSELS, Belgium - A mother killed her five children, then tried to commit suicide at the family's
home, officials said Wednesday. The four girls and a boy, aged between 4 and 14, were stabbed with a knife. The woman called
emergency services, then tried to kill herself. She was in critical condition at a hospital.
A note reading "Call the police,
urgent" was taped to the front door of the middle-class house on the outskirts of Nivelles, 20 miles south of Brussels.
"We know that the mother wrote
to a friend - she wrote a letter in which she says she will kill her children," Nivelles mayor Pierre Huart said. The friend
was helping police analyze the letter, hoping to discover clues to the motive.
The killings shocked the neighborhood,
especially since the family had no apparent problems, said Huart.
"It is a family with five children,
which is unusual. But it's a family, I think, well integrated with a lot of contacts with the neighbors. Their children were
particularly polite," the mayor said.
Children do not have to attend
school on Wednesday afternoon and the killings took place some two hours after they returned home.
"We don't know whether the woman
used other means than a knife and we don't know whether the children defended themselves," Bernard Goethals of the prosecutor's
office told RTL network.
Local media said the mother
was 51 years old, married to a man eight years her junior. He was not at home when the killings took place.