A Greek court on Friday gave a woman a life sentence for being found guilty of killing her nine-year-old daughter and is also suspected of killing two other daughters.
The situations involving 35-year-old Roula Pispirigou have caused anger and contemplation throughout the country.
Pispirigou received death threats, which led the government to urge for peaceful behavior. Riot police were deployed outside the court after a crowd gathered to shout insults at her following her arrest.
An Athens court found Pispirigou guilty of intentionally killing nine-year-old Georgina.
Pispirigou, who has been in detention for two years, is also awaiting a verdict in the suspected killings of daughters Malena, who was three-and-a-half when she died in 2019, and Iris, who was just six months old when she died in 2021.
Pispirigou was found to have administered ketamine to poison Georgina on January 29, 2022. Ketamine is typically used as an anaesthetic in veterinary surgery and in certain treatments for depression.
Georgina was in the hospital when she passed away, having been admitted multiple times over the previous 10 months due to convulsions that left her tetraplegic.
The court determined that her mother had attempted to kill her at least once during a previous hospital stay.
Malena had been diagnosed with acute liver failure. Initially, Iris's cause of death had been listed as heart failure.
However, tests after Georgina's death revealed they had been suffocated.
The media in Greece have labeled Pispirigou, a trained nurse, as a “modern-day Medea” after a character in Greek mythology who kills her sons after their father abandons her for another woman.
Pispirigou, who hails from western Greece, consistently maintained her innocence throughout the trial that started in January last year.
Meanwhile, a jury in New Zealand found a South African woman, Lauren Anne Dickason, guilty in August 2023 of murdering her three young daughters, saying she faced a life sentence for each killing.
Another mother admitted in 2020 to killing her three young daughters in an apartment in Vienna, Austrian police said after her arrest.
In another tragic event, the Enugu State Police Command, in 2022, arrested a 52-year-old man, Ifeanyi Amadikwa, in the Enugu East Local Government Area of the state for allegedly killing his three daughters.
AFP
