The Hong Kong police on Monday arrested a woman who confessed to killing her three daughters – aged two, four and about six – inside their flat in Kowloon.
Initial investigations showed that the woman called the police at around 11am claiming that her husband had stabbed her and her three daughters inside their subdivided flat in an eight-storey building in Kweilin Street, in Sham Shui Po.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) described the 29-year-old woman as a “Hong Konger with Indian roots”.
Police went to the scene and looked for the husband, who delivers food for a living. But they soon discovered that the woman and her daughters had not been stabbed.
The three girls were taken to Caritas Medical Centre, where they later died.
Doctors there reported that the girls did not have knife wounds and seemed to have been suffocated instead.
A source quoted by the SCMP said the woman later confessed to killing her daughters, and that she seemed to be suffering from a mental illness. She was said to have been babbling and talking about ghosts.
The woman reportedly told her mother over the phone earlier that day that she had killed her daughters. Moments later, she called the police to pin the blame on her husband.
Her husband met the police at around noon to help in the investigation.
His sister told reporters that he and his wife separated about a year ago and were awaiting a court’s ruling on who would get custody of their daughters.
Superintendent Alan Chung Nga Lun of the Kowloon West regional crime unit said in a news briefing that the woman and her daughters had been at the Sham Shui Po flat for about 11 months.
He said the woman had no record of a mental illness, and that there had been no reports of domestic violence involving the family.
Supt Chung said investigators found blood on a pillow that might have been used to suffocate the three girls.
Officers also noticed blood on one of the girls’ nose and mouth, he said.
Hong Kong’s Social Welfare Department said on Twitter that the woman and her daughters were being helped by a non-governmental organisation.
Ms Susan Chi, a volunteer with the Society for Community Organisation, an NGO located on the second floor of the building, told the SCMP that she saw police holding one girl and that another child was on a stretcher.
“I was heartbroken to see this happening in front of my eyes,” she said.
