Posted by Chinenye on Thu 30th Jul, 2026 - tori.ng
A routine hospital visit led to a horrifying discovery that has stunned France. Authorities uncovered multiple children's remains hidden inside a family home, triggering a major criminal investigation.
(This Photograph shows the French police Seals. Photo by Daily Mail)
Five children' remains were discovered in cardboard boxes at a French couple's home, leading to their imprisonment.
On Monday, the remains were discovered at a home in Orange, which is located in the southeast Provence area of France.
The 32-year-old woman gave birth to a healthy boy at home one day prior to being sent to the hospital.
A French couple have become the subject of a police investigation in Orange after five dead foetuses were discovered in cardboard boxes inside their home, just a day after the wife gave birth following a pregnancy she had denied.
The couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had reportedly been arguing over the contents of the boxes.
According to local media reports, this was said to be the third time the woman had denied being pregnant.
After she began experiencing abdominal pains, she went to hospital while her husband remained at home and looked inside the boxes they had been arguing over.
A source close to the investigation had earlier told a British newspaper that it was at that point he discovered the five dead babies, adding that all the foetuses were decomposing and appeared to have been there for some time.
He then contacted the police, who are now investigating.
The couple also have two children, aged eight and nine, who have since been taken in by relatives, while the newborn has been placed in the care of social services, according to the prosecutor's office.
Medical examinations are expected to determine the exact nature of the remains, along with the circumstances and timing of their deaths.
A neighbour, Florent Jean, described the couple to a French newspaper as "charming people" who had moved into the building around two years earlier, noting that their children attended a local primary school.
Recounting the moment emergency services arrived for the mother, the neighbour said she had questioned whether the woman could really be pregnant, given how thin she appeared.
The neighbour added that the woman would normally pick the children up from school at lunchtime to eat, while the man left for work each morning and returned in the evening.
The case has drawn comparisons with that of Dominique Cottrez, a nursing assistant from northern France who confessed to killing her eight newborn children at birth and concealing their bodies.
Cottrez, then 45, carried out the killings between 1989 and 2006 by suffocating each child shortly after birth, hiding the remains at a property in Villers-au-Tertre that later became known as a "house of horror," used to conceal the bodies for almost two decades.
Prosecution evidence indicated she had been able to hide her pregnancies from her husband and doctor due to being overweight.
In July 2010, new owners of Cottrez's former property discovered two of the bodies in plastic bags while working in the garden.
When police contacted her, she immediately admitted the remains belonged to two infants she had given birth to, and further told officers that six more infant bodies were hidden in the garage.
She was found guilty in July 2015 on eight counts of infanticide and sentenced to a total of nine years in prison.
In a separate case in March, a French court sentenced a 44-year-old woman to 25 years in prison over the deaths of two of her newborn babies, whose bodies police found in the family freezer.
In 2018, another woman, whose husband was reported to suffer from depression and had at times been violent, was sentenced to eight years in prison for drowning five of her newborn babies and freezing their bodies.