IIn the case of the discovery of the remains of two children in auctioned suitcases in New Zealand, the mother has denied the murder allegations against her. The 42-year-old did not appear for the brief hearing before an Auckland court on Wednesday, but her attorney Christopher Wilkinson-Smith pleaded not guilty. Judge Sally Fitzgerald scheduled the case for April 2024.
The remains of the two children were discovered in August after an unsuspecting family bought a trailerload of abandoned items, including the two suitcases, at an auction. The mother of the two children was arrested in mid-September in an apartment in Ulsan in south-east South Korea after a tip from the public. At the end of November she was transferred to New Zealand.
The 42-year-old is accused of killing her children, who were between five and ten years old at the time, in the Auckland region around 2018. According to the police, she then left for South Korea and was hiding there.
According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, it is a native South Korean with a New Zealand passport. At her first court hearing two weeks ago, it was confirmed that she was the biological mother of the two dead children.
Local media footage shows the woman being led out of a police station in Ulsan. She covered her head with a brown coat and when asked if she would confess, she kept saying, “I didn’t.”
