A 35-year-old mother with a history of depression woke her husband Friday morning to tell him she had just drowned two of their five children by holding them under water in the bathtub, police said, according to dpa. Sorrowing neighbours lit candles or placed roses on the street outside the second-storey apartment where the Croatian-born couple lived, at Gersthofen, a suburb of the German city of Augsburg. Ambulance crews called to the home vainly tried to resuscitate the girl, 2, and the boy, 5 months old. The mother was arrested, city police said. The father and the older children, 4, 6, and 8, who were asleep when the children were killed, received counselling. Neighbours said it was the last thing they would have expected from "such an ordinary family." The German media have highlighted a series of child killings by disturbed or dysfunctional mothers. Earlier this month police arrested a woman, 35, in Moenchengladbach after finding the bodies of her son Souhail, 8, and daughter Jasmina, 2. The woman was depressed after her husband left her. In December there were two such cases, with one woman accused of suffocating her two children and another admitting she drugged then suffocated her five sons. In Nauen, west of Berlin, police were holding a woman, 21, on Friday who admitted through her lawyer that she left her newborn baby in a kitchen cupboard till it showed no more signs of life.
