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The bodies of a 34-year-old woman and her 10-year-old daughter have been discovered inside freezing appliances in an flat in western Austria.

The deceased, a Syrian woman and her daughter, who had been unaccounted for for a number of months, were detected on Friday. The cooling units were hidden behind a drywall partition in the apartment, located in the city of Innsbruck.

A pair of males, a Austrian man, 55 and his brother aged 53, were arrested in the month of June. The elder brother, a colleague of the female victim, informed law enforcement last week that there had been an accident—but rejected intentional killing.

Informing the media previously, a spokesman for the legal authorities announced the two suspects were being detained on "serious suspicion of intentional killing".

The identities of those involved have been withheld by law enforcement, in following national regulations.

The vanishing of the mother and child was first reported by the female victim's relative, who resides in Germany, on 25 July 2024.

Investigators said the woman's colleague claimed at the time she had embarked on an prolonged visit with her child to see her family in the nation of Turkey.

The mother's debit card was then noted as being active overseas on multiple occasions.

Yet when officers examined the victim's residence, her cellphone was found.

A witness also reported hearing a loud noise in the dwelling, and cries of "mother" on the occasion the pair were thought to have disappeared.

A wider criminal probe was launched, with investigators discovering various messages originating from the woman's phone—such as a job termination message to her workplace and communications to the male associate.

Law enforcement said a amount in the thousands was also moved to the man.

A senior police official told media representatives on recently that a storage unit had been rented out before the victims' disappearance and a cooling unit had been positioned inside.

The brothers extracted the freezer from the facility on the day the woman and her child vanished, she said. And a week later, they acquired a second unit.

Officials believe they consider this indicates the fatalities were intentionally orchestrated.

"The reason for their demise was not identifiable due to the condition of the remains," the official commented.

A legal representative—of the public prosecutor's office—noted the specific order of occurrences is still unclear, but the victims were professionally hidden and were not found during a prior examination.

While the brothers were taken into custody in June, it was only on November 12 that the suspect confessed to an incident and to storing the victims. He denies any plan to cause death, authorities stated.

At the same time, his 53-year-old sibling admitted to a cover-up but denied knowledge of a murder.

The brothers are currently in custody awaiting trial in prisons in separate locations, around 117 miles (189km) apart.

Through a combined announcement, the nation's official for women's affairs and the top legal representative said the "suspected killing of two... constitutes the swift and cruel conclusion of a mother and child and reveals a cruel system".

"Female individuals are being murdered due to the sole reason that they are female," they went on to say.

"Femicides are a profoundly embedded and widespread concern that we must combat firmly."