The bodies of four newborn babies have been discovered at an apartment block in Austria - two in a communal freezer, one in a bucket of cement, and another in a shed.

Police were called to the hillside lodge in the southern city of Graz on Monday after one of the tenants went to the chest freezer, in the cellar, to fetch an ice cream for his daughter.

He pulled out a plastic bin-liner and at first assumed that it contained a chicken. But feelng the bag in the darkness he made out the tiny hands and legs.

Detectives subsequently found the body of a second baby tucked into the bottom of the freezer alongside some frozen vegetables. It had been there for at least a year.

Specially-trained sniffer dogs were brought in to search the building. A third corpse was found encased in cement yesterday.

Today, as investigators scoured the surrounding area, they found the fourth body wrapped up in a plastic bag and hidden in an outbuilding.

"We are continuing our search to see if there are any more," said Detective superintendent Harald Gutschi.

The mother, a woman aged 32, is reported to have confessed to the killings saying that she wanted to hide her pregnancies from her boyfriend. "I hope God can forgive me," she told investigators.

Mr Gutschi said that the woman, who works at a petrol station, had given birth to all of the babies in the bath and had no recollection of how they had died.

He said: "She said afterwards she was in a such shock that she does not know what happened, whether the baby drowned in the bathwater or whether she suffocated or beat it.

"We believe this may have happened once, but four times is highly improbable."

The woman's long-term partner, a carpenter aged 38 who has three children from another marriage, told police that he had never noticed that she was pregnant.

Mr Gutshi said: "This we cannot believe either. He is married to another woman, with whom he has three children, but has been living with the suspect."

The police said the babies did not appear to be twins or triplets and the woman is believed to have given birth to them over the course of the past three years.

The police said there were no scars visible on the corpses and autopsies were being done to determine the exact cause of death.

The grisly killings have stunned the tranquil Alpine nation which has among the lowest levels of violent crime in the world.

Graz, a picturesque city of 250,000 lies 120 miles south of Vienna and is the birthplace of film actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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