Details About Baby Killings Emerge

During the interrogation, the 39-year-old mother, identified as Sabine H., said she remembered giving birth in 1991 and bringing the newborn in a sack to Frankfurt/Oder, said a spokesman for the prosecutor, Ulrich Scherding, while declining to say exactly when the baby died.

The town on the German-Polish border is where Sabine H., an unemployed dental hygienist, lived for some 20 years before being arrested on July 31 after the corpses of the infants were discovered hidden in flower pots and the sand of an old aquarium in the garage belonging to the mother's parents.

According to the next edition of the weekly Der Spiegel to appear Monday, Sabine H. also told investigators that she had to hurry up to give birth to another child before her husband, Oliver H., got home from work in the evening.

For another birth, she recalled an image of a "baby cold and blue."

Father involved?

Her estranged husband divorced her a few months ago. The presumed father of the babies told investigators he never knew his wife was pregnant.

Matthias Schoeneburg, a lawyer for the mother, has contested the husband's claim.

"I cannot believe that he wasn't aware of the pregnancies," he said.

However, the police do not doubt the claims of Oliver H., according to Anette Bargenda, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation. But she questioned whether it was true that no one else knew about the births, according to the popular daily Bild.

Did family members know?

The tabloid also reported that some members of Sabine H.'s family were aware of the pregnancies, a claim the prosecutor could not confirm.

"Sabine H. had three children with Oliver H. in the mid-1980s," Bargenda said. "The first was a wanted child. The second more so and starting with the third, it was already too much for her."

Sabine H. is suspected of killing nine of her babies between 1988 and 1999 just after their births by leaving them to die after having given birth alone. She was allegedly intoxicated at the time.

She has four other living children, three of them adults and one 18 months old.

The grim killings have shocked the country and surfaced as an issue in the national election campaign as candidates lambasted an official who blamed attitudes in the former communist east German state for fostering the crime.