Thursday 21 June 2012

Lianne Smith is led away from the court in Girona, north-east Spain.

Lianne Smith trial
Lianne Smith is led away from the court in Girona, north-east Spain. She has admitted suffocating her children in a hotel on the Costa Brava. A jury is determining whether she is criminally responsible for their deaths. Photograph: Jordi Ribot Punti/Iconna/PA

A jury has retired to deliberate on the killings of a young boy and girl by their mother in a Spanish hotel room.

Lianne Smith, 45, has admitted smothering five-year-old Rebecca and 11-month-old Daniel with a plastic bag at the Miramar hotel in Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava in May 2010.

A jury of seven men and two women at the provincial court in Girona, north-east Spain, will decide whether she is criminally responsible for the children's deaths. They will be assisted by two further jury members who take part in deliberations but do not have a vote.

Smith's defence is seeking an acquittal, claiming she was in a state of "psychiatric disturbance" and suffering insurmountable fear when the tragedy happened.

Prosecutor Victor Pillado Quintas said on Wednesday, after hearing the evidence, that he acknowledged Smith had been suffering a "pathological emotional dependence and a psychotic disorder which impaired her faculties" when she killed her children.

Instead of a total of 38 years in prison for two counts of murder, he is now asking for 34.

Even if Smith is cleared of the charges, the judge, Adolfo Garcia Morales, can remand her to a psychiatric ward until she is considered fit to be released.

The killings took place shortly after Smith's partner, Martin Smith, was arrested in Barcelona by Spanish police acting on a European arrest warrant. The family had been living in Spain since 2007 after fleeing Lichfield, Staffordshire, because Smith's eldest daughter by her first husband had accused Martin Smith of sexually abusing her.

After her partner was deported to the UK, Smith thought British social services were in Spain to take her children away from her.

The jury heard that, after killing the children, Smith tried to take her own life by cutting herself with razors, covering her head with a plastic bag, hanging herself with a telephone cable and immersing herself in a bath.

In December 2010, Martin Smith was found guilty at Manchester crown court of using hypnotism, bullying and violence to groom and sexually abuse Smith's eldest daughter, Sarah Richardson, who has waived her right to anonymity. Last January, he was found hanged in his cell at Strangeways prison in Manchester.

Originally from North Shields, Martin Smith had been a singer in a band in the north-east before working as a TV psychic. He and Smith first lived together in a caravan in Northumberland before moving to Cumbria, where she worked as a manager in Cumbria county council's children's services department.

They moved to Lichfield in 2007 but stayed for a only few months before fleeing to Spain with Rebecca.

Daniel was born in Spain in June 2009. DNA evidence revealed in court on Wednesday suggested Martin Smith was not the biological father of the two children.

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