TOURS (France) - A 41-YEAR-OLD Frenchwoman who confessed to killing three of her newborn babies, hiding two corpses in the freezer of her expat home in South Korea, went on trial for murder on Tuesday. In a case that has horrified France, Veronique Courjault, faces life in jail after admitting killing two babies born in Seoul in 2002 and 2003, and a third child born in France in 1999.

Taking the stand in the courtroom in the central city of Tours, Courjault - who has spent three years of pre-trial detention - appeared physically frail and anxious, struggling to breathe. Wearing a light blue shirt and jacket, her hair clipped back, she exchanged a wordless look with her husband Jean-Louis, 42, who knew nothing of the pregnancies but has stood by his wife's side since her confession in 2006.

'I am very, very tense. I am here to support the woman I love,' Mr Courjault, who registered as a civil plaintiff to be able to attend the trial, told reporters outside the courtroom. Judges rejected a request from Courjault's defence team for the trial to proceed behind closed doors.

Already the mother of two young sons, Courjault hid two new pregnancies from her husband Jean-Louis, after he moved the family to the South Korean capital to take a job as engineer for the US car parts company Delphi. A heavyset woman, she managed to conceal her condition from her family, including a doctor sister-in-law, giving birth alone at home and smothering the babies.

Courjault told psychiatrists ahead of the trial she failed to accept the unborn infants were real. 'I could not feel them move inside me,' she said. 'As far as I was concerned they were never children. It was a part of myself, an extension of myself that I was killing.'

In July 2006, Jean-Louis Courjault stumbled on the bodies of two babies, wrapped in plastic bags, in the freezer in their home in Seoul, after going downstairs to put some fish in the icebox. After informing South Korean police of the gruesome find, he was allowed to return to France, where his wife and sons were spending their summer holidays.

Standing side by side, both parents at first strenuously denied any knowledge of the infants, but in October, after DNA tests confirmed she and her husband were the parents, Veronique Courjault admitted to the murders. She also told investigators she had smothered an earlier child, born in their home in western France in 1999, whom she says she burned in the family fireplace.

Courjault maintains her husband knew nothing of the killings, and he was cleared of charges of complicity last year and lives with their two sons, now aged 12 and 14, in the Tours region. Since his wife's confession, Mr Courjault has backed her up unflinchingly, visiting her regularly in jail and arguing that she acted in a state of extreme psychological distress.

'There is such as thing as pregnancies that go wrong. We need to try to understand,' he said.

Psychiatrists have admitted being faced with a 'fairly exceptional case,' saying Courjault appeared to be in a state of profound denial about her pregnancies, an issue set to figure prominently at the trial. Lawyer Helene Delhommais said Courjault, who has worked intensively with psychiatrists while in detention, was looking forward to the chance to try to explain her actions. The trial runs until June 17. -- AFP