A nine-year-old boy has been rescued after living locked in his father’s utility van in eastern France since 2024, a local prosecutor said.
The child has been hospitalized, and his father detained, prosecutor Nicolas Heitz said.
Police were on Monday last week alerted by a neighbor to the “sounds of a child” coming from a van in the village of Hagenbach, near the borders with Switzerland and Germany, Heitz said in a statement on Saturday.
Photo: AP
After forcing the van open, officers found the child “lying in a fetal position, naked, covered by a blanket on top of a mound of trash and near excrement,” Heitz said.
The boy was clearly malnourished and could no longer walk after being in a seated position for so long, he said.
The boy’s father told investigators that he put the child in the truck in November 2024 “to protect him,” because his partner wanted to send the then-seven-year-old to a psychiatric hospital, the prosecutor said.
There was no medical record that the boy had any psychiatric problems before he disappeared, and he had had good grades in school, Heitz said.
The boy told investigators that he had “big difficulties” with his father’s partner and thought his father “had no choice” but to lock him up, he said.
The boy said he had not showered since 2024, Heitz said.
The father was handed preliminary kidnapping and other charges and kept in custody. His partner denied knowledge that the boy was in the van, the prosecutor said.
She was handed preliminary charges, including for failure to help a minor in danger, and released under judicial supervision.
The boy’s 12-year-old sister and the 10-year-old daughter of his father’s partner were placed in the care of social services.
The prosecutor’s office is investigating whether others were aware of the boy’s detention.
Friends and family told investigators they thought the boy was in a psychiatric institution. His teachers were told he had transferred to a different school, the prosecutor’s office said.
The authorities have not released the names of the victim or his relatives.
Hagenbach residents contacted by the Associated Press expressed shock on Saturday over the cases and said they were unaware of the boy’s whereabouts, but did not want to discuss details.
The prosecutor declined to comment further.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS