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Mum who froze babies ‘not insane’: doctors

Alex Dunham
Alex Dunham - [email protected]
Mum who froze babies ‘not insane’: doctors
After giving birth in the bath tub, the woman claims the baby wasn’t breathing and decided to freeze it.Photo: Chris Waits/Flickr

Psychiatric experts studying a Spanish mother who allegedly killed two of her babies and hid their bodies in her kitchen freezer have told a Seville judge she has no mental illness.

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Sara Huertas is currently facing a 40-year prison sentence if found guilty of murdering two of her new born babies.

It was her husband Francisco who discovered one of the bodies in 2010 when cleaning the house on a day Sara was out working.

When he cleared out the freezer to begin defrosting it, he found a rubbish bag stuffed towards the back.

According to Spanish daily ABC, he nearly fainted when he saw what was inside, but it wasn’t until several days later that he found out the baby was his.

Sara, who was arrested soon after Francisco’s shocking discovery, had kept her pregnancies to herself.

She told the judge her husband had threatened to leave her if she fell pregnant again, the couple already having two other children.

After giving birth in the bath tub, she claims the baby wasn’t breathing and decided to freeze it.

“I didn’t want to get rid of it or forget it, it didn’t seem right to just stick in the bin,” she told the court at her initial hearing.

Three weeks later, Francisco relived the same nightmare when he was continuing to clear up the very same chest freezer.

Spanish Civil Guard had searched the premises but had inexplicably not looked again in the same place the first corpse was found.

“How is it possible that another baby has been found in the freezer?” the magistrate asked Sara in the next hearing.

The 34-year-old woman, who was pregnant yet again while in prison, said she had no idea how the second baby had got there.

A Seville forensics team determined both babies had died of asphyxia but too much time had passed to be able to say if it was their mother who had murdered them.

Psychiatrists now say there is no indication that Sara suffers or suffered any mental illness at the time of the babies’ deaths, stating that it was impossible to “forget everything” about the second pregnancy as it lasts nine months. 

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