Germany - Five brothers, ages 3-9, drugged & suffocated, Darry, 5 Dec 2007

The bodies of the five boys - Jonas, Justin, Ronan, Liam and Aidan - were found on Wednesday in their house in Darry, a small village near the Baltic Sea coast...

She was questioned by police investigators in a secure psychiatric facility yesterday, where she has been classified as a delusional and high-risk patient...

The father of the three youngest children, believed to be an American citizen, had expressed his concerns to the authorities in August that the woman was suffering from "religious fantasies"....

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State prosecutor Michael Bimler told the court in Kiel the woman, identified only as Steffi K., suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is "incapable of understanding the injustice of her crime."

She did not testify but the court has been handed a written statement in which she confessed to giving the boys tranquilizers before suffocating them with rubbish bags.

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A German court committed a woman to indefinite psychiatric care on Thursday for suffocating her five young sons with plastic trash bags.

The 32-year-old woman, named only as Steffi K., had been found guilty of killing the boys, aged between 3 and 9 years old, in the village of Darry in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

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"She told the court and the psychologist that she had heard voices threatening the children and she wanted to protect them. She killed them because she believed she was protecting them from these evil powers," said a spokesman for the court in Kiel.

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