Frenchwoman admits killing third baby

TOURS, France - A Frenchwoman at the centre of the "Seoul freezer babies" case has admitted killing a third child, a police source said on Thursday, the day after she confessed to killing two of her own children.

Veronique Courjault told police in the central city of Tours she cremated the infant's corpse and disposed of it in France before she and her husband Jean-Louis moved to Seoul in 2002, the source said.

The couple are already under investigation 9000 km away after the bodies of two new-borns were discovered wrapped in towels in a freezer in their home in the South Korean capital Seoul.

The gruesome killings have shocked France and received heavy press coverage. "She has confessed," ran the headline on the daily Le Parisien newspaper over a picture of the 38 year-old Courjault staring blankly ahead.

Courjault admitted to the third killing during examination by investigators on Thursday, the source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.

She said she had hidden all three pregnancies from her husband and had acted alone in killing her children, the source said.

The police source said the two corpses discovered in South Korea were not twins who died at the same time, as first thought, but that Courjault had admitted killing the children in separate incidents.

"She said she had two successive pregnancies in Korea and she strangled the two children," the source told Reuters.

Courjault could face life in prison if convicted of murdering her own children.

Judicial officials were to launch a formal murder investigation late on Thursday and an examining magistrate will have to order psychiatric tests to determine her state of mind.

Courjault, who has two other children aged nine and 11, has explained her actions by saying the pregnancies were unwanted.

Investigators are now probing whether her husband was aware of the three pregnancies, though police say his shocked reaction to his wife's confession appeared genuine.

It was Jean-Louis Courjault, 40, who alerted South Korean police to the freezer babies after he cut short a business trip to return to Seoul.

The couple initially denied being the babies' parents, despite a Korean DNA test which was confirmed by a second test in France that prompted judicial authorities there to launch their own probe into the case.

- REUTERS