Ontario's top court says the case of a woman who married her son, conceived several children with him and tried to pass him off as an African prince "gives new meaning to the word 'bizarre.'"

The Court of Appeal for Ontario upheld an incest conviction, as well as convictions on 46 counts of forgery and uttering forged documents, for a woman named B.D. in a decision released Thursday.

B.D. had appealed, saying the judge should have struck down DNA warrants, erred in his charge to the jury and in admitting some documents.

B.D., 47, maintains she is married to a man named Prince Wafi R. Dz., a real prince and a descendent of Nigerian or Ethiopian royalty. But, as found at her trial, her husband is really her 21-year-old son, Wafi. She also maintains that Wafi died in a volcano in the Congo, the court said.

The Appeal Court decision did not use real names, to protect the identities of the people involved, instead using fictitious names to help the decision be understood.

Psychiatric reports filed for the B.D.'s sentencing said she suffers from some delusional psychosis and is "intellectually deficient" with an IQ of 60.

The woman has seven children, including Wafi, three children fathered by Wafi and a girl named Wafu who died of natural causes at the age of two, but with characteristic traits of inbreeding, the court said.

The forgery-related charged stemmed from her attempts to obtain false birth certificates for seven fictitious children.

The Appeal Court said the case "gives new meaning to the word 'bizarre,'" and the trial judge said, "I have never encountered a more bizarre case in my quarter century in the law."

Wafi, who the court decision refers to as Wafi/Prince, was also convicted of incest, two counts of uttering forgeries and two counts of fabricating evidence in a family court child protection proceeding.

When Wafi brought the lifeless body of a two-year-old girl to a hospital in June 2001, the nurses became suspicious because of confusion over whether he was the girl's brother or father.

DNA tests found he was both.

"The subsequent tests established that (B.D.) and Wafi/Prince were the parents of Wafu and that (B.D.) is the mother of Wafi/Prince," the court said.

The court decision goes on to detail elaborate attempts to have official documents drawn up to prove to the Children's Aid Society - which had taken the woman's other children - that Wafi and Prince were two people.

At another court proceeding involving B.D., Wafi, his brother Olaseni and Prince Wafi Dz., were called as witnesses. A lawyer became suspicious that Wafi and Prince were the same person so she asked that they come to the courthouse at the same time. When two men arrived, the lawyer testified, they were who she knew to be Wafi and Olaseni.

B.D. also tried to get Wafi/Prince's name and date of birth changed on his driver's licence, going so far as to forge a Ministry of Transportation supervisor's signature, the court said.

At B.D.'s trial, Olaseni testified that he met Prince in late 1999 and thought he looked a lot like Wafi, who moved out of the house in July 2000. He also denied pretending he was Wafi so Wafi could pretend he was Prince at the earlier court proceeding.

Wafi's high school principal, who remembered him quite well, and his high school teacher, both identified Wafi/Prince as Wafi.

"Taken together, a number of the foregoing incidents strongly suggest a pattern on the part of the appellant and Wafi/Prince of taking suspicious and overt steps to attempt to establish in public that Wafi was in fact Prince," the court said.