Lianne Smith
Her two adorable kids she killed
A British mother who killed her two young children just days after her lover fugitive pedophile was captured by the police goes on trial in Spain.
Lianne Smith, 45, suffocated her daughter Rebecca, age five and 11 month old son Daniel with a plastic bag in a hotel in the country two years ago.
She feared being caught by social services and shelters after her partner, Martin Smith, was finally tracked down and arrested in Barcelona.
He was arrested in 2010 after an international search and extradited to Britain to face charges of child sexual abuse. But while awaiting trial in a cell his British lover checked into a hotel in the seaside town of Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava, just days after killing her two children.
The young kids were suffocated in Room 101 of the £53-a-night Miramar Hotel in the popular seaside resort. Smith later admitted to sleeping next to their dead bodies.
Smith, was later found guilty of molesting his stepdaughter and jailed for 16 years. However, in the beginning this year he was found hanged in his prison cell at Strangeways Prison in Manchester.
Miss Smith, former manager of a children's service, has already confessed to killing her two children, but lawyers are looking for an acquittal on grounds of diminished responsibility.
She was taken to a Spanish prison, where she has spent the last two years in custody, to attend the three-day hearing in Girona, near Barcelona.
A jury in the District Court will determine if she is criminally liable for two counts of murder.
Her lawyer said she was in a state of "mental disorder" and the fear was insurmountable when the tragedy happened.
Prosecutors are seeking a jail sentence of 19 years for each murder.
The jury will play a DVD of police interrogations in which Miss Smith admitted to the murders calmly and show them a handwritten note in which she also confessed.
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