Depressed woman admits poisoning pregnant friends

An Austrian woman who was depressed after the miscarriage of her own child says she poisoned two of her friends after hearing they were pregnant.

Angela M, 26, was desperate to have a child after her third miscarriage, when she heard the two women were pregnant.

She told the court, "I couldn't stand the thought of them having babies who would be growing up when mine was dead, mine should have been with them as well, but instead mine died while theirs went on," Austrian Independent reports.

The woman said depression drove her to poison her friends' drinks with medication she had received after her miscarriage.

"I asked for a glass of water, and she said she had a special drink for pregnant women, that she didn't need any more," one of Angela's friends said.

"A short while later I started to bleed, and then I lost the baby. When I found out what she had done, I wrote back and told her she was a murderer. I can't forgive her."

Two months later, Angela invited her sister-in-law to visit and mixed the same medication into her hot chocolate, and then "watched me as I drank it", the victim told the court. She also suffered a miscarriage.

Angela went on to conceive again, and now has a three-year-old daughter. But her guilty secret became too much to bear, and she eventually confessed to the poisonings.

The judge sentenced the woman to 18 months in jail, 14 suspended, saying "you maliciously took the lives of two unborn babies."