OLPE, Germany - A 44-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of killing three of her babies after their bodies were discovered in the family freezer by her grown children looking for pizza, police said Monday.

The three infants are believed to have been born alive, but authorities were awaiting autopsy results to determine how they died, said Johannes Daheim, a spokesman for prosecutors investigating the case.

The woman, her 47-year-old husband and three adult children -- two sons, aged 18 and 22, and a 24-year-old daughter -- have lived in the town in a single-family home since 1984.

The children discovered the frozen babies on Saturday afternoon while their parents were away for the weekend, investigator Martin Feldmann said.

The 18-year-old and his sister had been looking for a frozen pizza and came across a lot of expired food so decided to clean out the freezer.

The teenager then found three identical packets on the bottom of the freezer and opened one and saw the head and arm of an infant that was wrapped in a hand towel, police said.

The children confronted their parents when they returned home Sunday, and the couple and their daughter then went to police together to tell authorities, said Herbert Fingerhut, head of the police investigation, at a news conference.

The corpulent woman apparently concealed the three pregnancies, believed to have been in the 1980s, not only from neighbors but also her own family, Fingerhut said.

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