A 33-year-old French man has admitted killing his wife and their four children, saying he heard voices telling him to “cause harm”, the public prosecutor said on Thursday. French police on Tuesday arrested a man with a history of psychiatric illness on suspicion of murdering his Haitian-born wife and their children, aged nine months, and four, seven and 10 years old. Their bodies had been found on Monday, Christmas Day, at their home in the town of Meaux, in the Île-de-France region east of Paris. The man, a plumber, had been receiving treatment since 2017 for depression and psychotic behaviour, the prosecutors had said. The Meaux public prosecutor, Jean-Baptiste Bladier, citing the results of the autopsy on Wednesday, said the 35-year-old mother and her 10- and seven-year-old daughters had received “around 10 stab wounds each” which had been “administered with great violence”. The four-year-old and nine-month-old boys “died of asphyxia following drowning”, he said. The suspect said he had “not been able to identify a trigger for his act”, the prosecutor said, and that he had “felt nothing” and “felt empty” after murdering his family. According to Bladier, the suspect “indicated that he had been taking his daily medication” since 2019, but had not taken it on 24 December. The prosecutors did not release the exact date of the murder. Police discovered the bodies at about 9pm on Monday. Neighbours told police they had heard cries downstairs during the night of 24-25 December. The man had been detained in 2019 after stabbing his partner in the shoulder, while she was pregnant with their third child, and then trying to kill himself. She had refused to press charges.