Father admits slashing throats of his 5 year old daughter and 10 year old son

A British father yesterday admitted cutting the throats of his two young children after being allowed to spend time alone with them for the first time since his bitter divorce from their French mother.

The 48-year-old man, who has not been named, murdered his ten-year-old son and daughter, aged five, on Saturday afternoon before fleeing on roller skates.

His ex-wife had handed over the children on Friday evening and they spent a night in the old family home in Saint-Priest, a suburb of Lyon in eastern France.

The father, a 48-year-old English man who is involved in a bitter child custody battle was being held by French police today

This was despite the unemployed man being a heavy drinker and having been violent towards his wife before their divorce up to three years ago.

When the mother, an accountant’s assistant also in her 40s, returned to pick up the children from the second-floor apartment at around 5pm on Saturday she saw the father looking panicked.

‘He was in the stairwell of the block and his clothes were covered in blood,’ said a neighbour. ‘He made off on a pair of roller skates, leaving his car in the apartment block’s garage.’ The man was found in the city’s 8th arrondissement around three hours later.

A judicial source said a knife thought to be the murder weapon had been found in the flat. The source said the double murder was ‘clearly linked to a painful separation’ and ‘legal procedures concerning the right to access to the children which the father deemed insufficient’.

In 2010 the father had attacked his then wife, leading to these rights of access being withdrawn.

This was the first weekend since then that the man had been allowed to have the boy and girl with him without an adult third party.

The Lyon prosecuting source said the man ‘admitted being the murderer’ but ‘did not give many more details’. The father has been living in France for ten years and was married in 2005.

Investigators are particularly keen to know who gave him legal authority to look after the children. It emerged that the couple had also been involved in a legal dispute over the flat, which is worth around £100,000.