The police discovered the remains of nine newborn babies buried in a garden in eastern Germany and arrested a woman believed to be the children's mother, prosecutors said.
The bodies were found on Sunday in the garden of a house in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near the Polish border, Michael Neff, a spokesman for prosecutors in nearby Frankfurt an der Oder, said on Monday.
Neff said the 39-year-old woman was believed to be the mother of the children and was being held on suspicion of manslaughter. Her name was not released.
Investigators believed the children were born between 1988 and 2004 and that they had died shortly afterward, Neff said.
Neff said police found the remains after receiving a tipoff after someone who had been working at the property found what appeared to be human bones.
Police said dozens of officers and sniffer dogs were searching the sprawling garden on Monday to see if other bodies had been buried there. Police spokesman Peter Salender said it was unclear if the women had other children.
The discovery came after a string of similarly gruesome finds elsewhere in Germany. Last week, a dead baby girl was found in a public toilet in Magdeburg and an infant boy on a recycling company's conveyer belt in Guetersloh.
In June, a walker in Lower Saxony found a baby in a plastic bag whose throat had been cut.
In neighbouring Austria, authorities are holding the parents of at least three of four infants whose bodies were found in a freezer and entombed in concrete-filled buckets.
