Police in Italy are searching for a German couple who apparently abandoned three children in a pizza restaurant.
The family ate together in Aosta, in northern Italy, before the mother and her companion went outside for a cigarette. They never returned.
The three children - a baby, a toddler and a boy of no more than six - have been taken into care in Italy.
Police said the children were in good health, though the adults had appeared poor and the children "neglected".
Police identified the woman as Ina Caterina Remhof, 26, and said she was the mother of the children, the AP news agency reported.
They said the man, Sascha Schmidt, 24, was not the children's father.
The family had arrived in Italy a few days earlier, police said.
The couple disappeared on Sunday night, though the search was only formally announced on Tuesday.
The owner of the pizzeria in Aosta, Carmelo Casella, said the family had been eating pizza late on Sunday, when the couple went outside to smoke and never came back.
After 10 minutes, staff went to look but there was no sign of them.
Their car was found nearby.
"Documentation found in the car makes us believe that the couple obviously are having difficulties," AP quoted the police saying, apparently referring to financial problems.
"We are actively looking for the parents, who may perhaps still be in Italy," said a spokesman for the local authority.
Police said by Tuesday they had tracked down the children's maternal grandmother in Germany.
-do you think that something may have happened to the parents? or left by choice? what are your thoughts...
ooo... this is scary. If there car was still there, there is a possibility they were taken. They couldve just gotten a Taxi though. But how do you leave cute little kids, how could you leave your baby? There are so many possibilities, poor kids. :( well i hope that if they do find the parents they dont give the kids back if they did leave them
maybe they should have got their tubes tide or a vesectomy or however you spell it, before they had three kids. its like the parents who are old and have their first kid be mentally challenged and they try again and get another mentally challneged kid. the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting diffeent results!
uh there's not enough evidence right now to tell what really happened, but i hope that they find the parents or that the kids are put in a safe and good home.
well its hard to decide because why would they leave her kids at a resturant where there is people who saw them, but then at the same time i think they did because they said they were having finacial problems and maybe didnt have enough money to manage themselves and the kids
i feel like they left the children by choice. it said that the only thing the car indicated was that they had no money. not that someone was brutally beaten and killed in it. i especially think that the abandoned the kids because... i mean the man is not THAT much younger than the mother but he wasnt even their father. it seems suspicous to me
