After the death of a pair of siblings in downtown Hanau, the police arrested the wanted suspect in France. It was the 47-year-old father of the children, said a spokeswoman for the Hanau public prosecutor on Saturday. The children were found on Wednesday morning. Police and prosecutors are investigating the man on suspicion of murder.

Investigators from the Hessian State Criminal Police Office managed to track down the suspect after the crime, police and the Hanau public prosecutor said. “With the support of other experts from the Federal Criminal Police Office’s target search, the 47-year-old was located near Paris on Saturday morning and arrested there.”

“So far he has not commented on the fact”

The man lives in the Rhine-Main area. He reportedly did not resist the arrest. “So far he has not commented on the fact,” it said. The public prosecutor’s office in Hanau assumes that he will be transferred to Germany in a few weeks and brought before the investigating judge. According to the spokeswoman, the man has an Indian passport. It was initially unclear whether he also had German citizenship.

The dead siblings are a seven-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy who lived in the apartment where the crime happened. Several months before the crime, the Hanau youth welfare office had had indications of family problems, as the city had announced.

An autopsy revealed that the girl died from injuries caused by “sharp force in the neck area”. The boy died from multiple internal injuries from a fall from a great height. The reasons for the fall are part of the investigation.

Passers-by had alerted the police after discovering the seriously injured boy on the ground in front of a high-rise building near Hanau’s market square. He died a short time later in the Hanau city hospital. The officers found the dead girl on the balcony of an apartment on the ninth floor of the skyscraper.

The investigators had been searching for the man under high pressure. Already on Wednesday they had spoken of an alleged family background to the crime. It was initially unclear where the mother was at the time of the crime. (dpa)