Detectives have been alerted to the scene of a suspected murder-suicide by the cries of three children, including a newborn baby.

Police said they found the bodies of a 26-year-old woman and her 30-year-old husband when neighbours heard the children sobbing and raised the alarm.

The woman is thought to have been violently attacked and murdered by her partner, who then killed himself at the family home in the West Midlands.

DI Jim Munro said police were not looking for anyone else in connection with the deaths.

He said: “This is a truly tragic incident: it’s understood the woman was violently attacked before the offender took his own life.

“The timeline of exactly what happened is unclear but we believe the two people died during the morning.

“There were three children, including a small baby, present at the address when officers made the discovery and they are being looked after by loved ones and will receive specialist support.”

Neighbours described how the eldest child, believed to be seven or eight, rushed out of the house and banged on a neighbours’ door after the violent attack on Saturday afternoon.

One neighbour, who declined to be named, said the couple, thought to be eastern European, lived at the semi-detached house with a baby and two other young children.

“One of them, the middle child, was refusing to come out initially, as they wanted to stay inside with their mother,” he said.

Another neighbour added: “It’s such a shock, I can’t believe it. Nothing usually happens here, it’s really quiet. I just feel for the kids, you know, because they’ve lost their mum and their dad.”

Two police officers sat in an unmarked car parked outside the house in Oldbury on Monday.

The curtains of the house were drawn, while in the tidy back garden a trampoline and a child’s ride-along car could be seen.

Postmortems will take place on Monday, police said.