The father of the children found rotting in unclaimed suitcases won at auction died from cancer before his wife left for South Korea, it has been revealed.
The grisly discovery of the boy and girl, thought to be aged between five and 10 when they died four years before being found on August 11 in Auckland, New Zealand created global headlines.
A family who successfully bid for the contents of a storage unit from Safe Store Papatoetoe at auction found the bodies inside two similar-sized suitcases when they were sent to their Clendon Park home.
New Zealand and South Korean police are now cooperating in a homicide investigation over the horror case.
The family who opened the suitcases are not under suspicion.
Instead police are understood to be focusing on the whereabouts of a woman, believed to be the children’s’ mother, who flew to Seoul in 2018.
Enquiries involving both police forces and Interpol have determined she is missing, but her last known location was in South Korea.
Detectives have now revealed that up to a year before she flew to South Korea, her husband died from cancer, stuff.co.nz reported.
He was the children’s father.
