“There are a lot of questions still to be answered, but I continue to support her,” said the father of a 30-year-old woman charged this week with the murder of her three small children, all aged under four years. The woman, identified as Bieke W., was held in detention on suspicion of the three murders, of children aged four, two and three months. The children were apparently suffocated.
Later, the woman tried to kill herself by driving straight at a bridge support on the motorway, without success. “I’m not angry at her,” her father said. “She wasn’t herself.”
According to reports citing unnamed sources “close to the investigation,” the woman was suffering from a severe post-natal depression. However while that is a real and often serious condition, it is unlikely to be diagnosed during a three-hour inteview with an investigating magistrate, rather than a psychiatrist. The family confirms.
“She never gave us the slightest sign. She was a bit tired, that’s for sure. But what young mother isn’t? She’d had three young children one after the other, of course it was hard.”
Again according to reports – based on leaks from the investigation – the father of the three children and partner of the accused lay upstairs asleep while the drama was going on. The first anyone knew of what had happened was when emergency services attended the location of the failed suicide attempt, when the suspect revealed all.
The father of the children, according to their grandfather, is now on sedatives. “The medication keeps him a little bit calmer. But he’s a broken man, and that’s only to be expected. He is now questioning his own future. Everything is gone, everything is destroyed, he tells me.”
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
