French mother jailed for 8 years in 'case of frozen babies'

PARIS, June 19 (RIA Novosti) - A French court has sentenced a woman to eight years in jail for killing three babies she gave birth to in secret, hiding two of the bodies in the freezer of her family home, local media said.

The court in Tours, central France, found Veronique Courjault, 41, guilty of burning the body of a child born in France in 1999 and strangling two other children born in 2002 and 2003 while the family lived in South Korea.

The woman hid two bodies in the freezer in their family home in Seoul. Her husband, Jean-Louis, found the bodies in July 2006 while Veronique and the couple's two children, now aged 12 and 14, were on vacation in France.

The father informed South Korean police of the chilling discovery and was allowed to join his family after giving DNA evidence to investigators.

The couple initially insisted that bodies were not their own children, but Veronique later confessed in court that she had been pregnant three times without her husband's knowledge and hid the fact behind flowing clothes.

Prosecutors sought a 10-year sentence but the court announced an eight-year jail term on Thursday as experts said Veronique suffered from the syndrome of denial of pregnancy.

The woman will spend only five years in jail as she had been in custody for three years during the investigation.

The husband endorsed the light sentence saying that it "will allow us to rebuild, to make out the light at the end of the tunnel."

"It's clear that Veronique's actions were absolutely not calculated. For me, she's ill," he added.