A mother suspected of holding her children captive in a “house of horrors” since the height of Covid gave police a chilling excuse as she was placed in handcuffs.
Neighbours had raised the alarm after hearing children making noises in the house, despite never having seen any coming or going. Police kept watch on the house in Oviedo, Spain, for several days before raiding it and found three young boys inside who had been in the home for four years, since the Covid crisis. The doors were kept locked and windows permanently closed and police afterwards reported one of the freed children kneeling on the grass and touching it in “amazement”.
Spanish police described the house as being in a disgusting state, with hoards of rubbish and mountains of accumulated medicines. The children, two eight-year-old twin boys and their ten-year-old brother, were forced to wear nappies and forced to sleep in caged beds.
One police officer told local press the mother had claimed her children had “serious pathogens”. The officer added: “They were very scared and around the mother, who told us all the time the little ones had serious pathologies and that we should not approach them. “They had three masks, each on top of each other. They were oblivious to any contact with reality.”
The children were kept out of school and were forbidden to leave the house. Each was barefoot and wearing nappies. When the police came to take them out of the building the children did not even have shoes of their sizes to wear.
The chief commissioner of the Local Police of Oviedo, Francisco Javier Lozano, told a press conference the German couple were arrested. The initial search of the house had been made more difficult because Spain was in darkness by the electricity outage.
He added: “We have dismantled the house of horrors.”
When police knocked on the front door, the father answered but asked the officers to wait for a few minutes so the children could put their masks on.
The children, who spoke mostly in English, were evaluated at the Central University Hospital of Asturias and placed under the guardianship of the Government of the Principality.
The 53-year-old husband and his wife, a 48-year-old American, with dual nationality are currently in custody without bail pending further investigations.
The pair are expected to be charged with crimes of habitual abuse, abandonment of minors, and against fundamental rights.
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