French baby-killing mother jailed

Mrs Courjault's husband was cleared of any involvement

A French woman who admitted killing three of her own babies and hiding two of them in a freezer has been sentenced to eight years in jail.

Veronique Courjault secretly gave birth and then killed two babies at her expatriate home in South Korea before putting their bodies in the freezer.

She admitted killing another child in France in 1999.

The court in Tours, central France, rejected the argument that she had been suffering from "pregnancy denial".

Mrs Courjault was quite heavily built and her husband, Jean-Louis, has said he was unaware she was pregnant.

He has been cleared of any involvement.

He has steadfastly stood by his wife, visiting her regularly in prison, where she has spent three years in pre-trial detention.

'No relationship'

Mrs Courjault wept as she testified to the court on Wednesday.

"I killed my children," she said, according to AP news agency. "I was conscious of being pregnant, but not of being pregnant with babies," she added, saying she knew it sounded "absurd".

She said she did not consciously set out to hide the pregnancies.

"It was my body that blocked" the pregnancies, she said. "No relationship with the babies developed."

Mrs Courjault had faced life in prison, and her husband praised the relatively light sentence she received.

It "will allow us to rebuild, to make out the light at the end of the tunnel", he said.

Mrs Courjault initially denied any connection to the bodies discovered in the freezer by her husband in 2006.

But when DNA analysis proved the Courjaults were the babies' natural parents, she admitted suffocating the two infants in Korea in 2002 and 2003.

She also confessed to killing a third baby, born in secret in France in 1999, and burning its body in a fireplace.