French prosecutors on Thursday demanded a 20-year prison term for a woman charged with killing five of her children right after they were born, a crime that only came to light one and a half decades after the corpses were discovered.

Fifty-five years old Sylvie Horning was detained in November 2017, on suspicions she murdered the five children between 1990 and 2005.

The woman, who is now a mother of three adult children, is thought to have hidden her pregnancies even from her partner, giving birth in secret and then strangling the newborns, at her house in Wittelsheim in eastern France.

Reports say the initial investigations found nothing to link the woman to the deaths, until bodies of four babies in rubbish bags were discovery in 2003, in the nearby Galfingue forest.

The DNA tests on the bodies linked the woman to the babies.