Flowers lay at the building gate where four children between 9 months and 10 years old and their mother were found killed, Dec. 26, 2023 in Meaux, France. NICOLAS GARRIGA / AP

A mother and her four young children were murdered in their home in a city near Paris in what local police said was a "very violent" crime over Christmas.

The bodies of the family members were found on Christmas Day in their apartment in Meaux, France, the AFP news agency and the Associated Press reported.

Prosecutors said the primary suspect is the children's 33-year-old father, and he was arrested on Tuesday.

Neighbors alerted police after spotting a pool of blood outside the family's door, and officers then discovered the bodies, prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier told reporters.

He said the 35-year-old mother and two daughters, ages 7 and 10, had been stabbed to death, and two boys, a 4-year-old and the 9-month-old baby, were suffocated or drowned.

"The mother and the two girls had received a very high number of knife wounds," AFP quoted the prosecutor as saying.

"The human toll is horrifying, a whole family was killed, stabbed in an atrocious conditions," Meaux Mayor Jean-Francois Cope told the AP. "It's an absolute horror."

The suspect had known his wife since high school and they had been together for 14 years, but this reportedly wasn't the first encounter with violence.

Citing the prosecutor, the BBC reported that the suspect had attacked his wife with a knife in 2019, a month before she gave birth to their third child. That case was dropped. Upon his arrest in the killings of his family, the man told police he "knew why he had been detained," and "spoke of his unhappiness and depression," Bladier said. The suspect was also seen with wounds on his hand.

The prosecutor said the man will undergo psychiatric examinations.

Neighbor Maissa Ketfi told the AP that the mother was "fighting for her children."

"She was never complaining and one day you just learn this," she said Tuesday. "Yesterday at night, we all had a big knot in our stomach when we learned. We were terrorized, four kids and the youngest was nine months. We cannot even imagine the scene."

Source