A British woman has been detained in Finland after being accused of murdering her young child.
The child died on Sunday at a two-bed apartment in the Suurpelto area of Espoo, Finland’s second biggest city. Details were confirmed by Finnish police on Wednesday, when a woman, aged 35, was detained prior to trial by Länsi-Uusimaa district court.
In a statement, police said the mother had confessed to the killing and a trial date had been set for 17 April.
They did not confirm the age or gender of the child other than to say that the child was under school age (seven-years-old in Finland). But unrelated court documents show that the child was a two-year-old boy.
A spokeswoman for the British embassy in Finland said: “We are assisting Finnish authorities and providing consular assistance.”
The suspect, from Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Staffordshire, began working for a training company in Helsinki, teaching English as a second language, in December last year, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously worked as an English teacher for international students at Keele university in the UK.
In 2011, she married her husband, a Canadian and Algerian citizen, in Canada, court documents show. They lived in the UK, Finland and China together before returning to Finland in January last year.
However, the couple applied for a divorce last year, which came into effect earlier this month, and had disagreed over custody arrangements, the documents said.
In its statement on Wednesday, Finnish police said it could not provide any more details at this stage and further information ahead of the trial would be limited.
Additional reporting by Reetta Vaahtoranta
