A case reminiscent of the home of the Turpin family in the US has been uncovered in the Netherlands, where police arrested a 67-year-old man who allegedly sexually abused and held his children captive for almost a decade.
Gerrit-Jan van Dorsten had imprisoned six of his nine children on the family's remote farm and threatened not to speak, telling them that "evil spirits" would understand if they revealed what was happening.
He is accused of illegal detention, child abuse and money laundering.
How the horror was revealed
According to CNN.gr, in October, police located Van Dorsten and five underage brothers on a farm in Roinerwald, North Holland, after a sixth child of the family escaped to a nearby village. Residents of the area alerted the police.
"All children report corporal punishment when they were thought to be under the influence of spirits. This happened at a very young age, with children aged four or five, "prosecutor Diana Rogen told the judges.
"Punishments included beatings, sometimes with a stick or other objects, hair pulling, and sometimes forced to sit in a bathtub with cold water for hours."
The six youngest children were kept isolated from their birth and separated from their older siblings. A 15-year-old girl moved to another city while a 12-year-old boy was forced to live alone in a caravan.
Van Dorsten told the children that their mother's death in 2004 was their fault because they came in contact with the outside world. "I had a bad spirit and I didn't want to convey it to them," one of the children told prosecutors.
The children are monitoring the process from another location, said Judge Herman Franzen. They may testify later.
The children's allegations were confirmed by the diaries written by Van Dorsten and confiscated during the search of the farm, the prosecutor said.
Between 2007 and their discovery last year, Van Dorten deprived them of food, water and medicine. Some of the older children said their father forced them into having sex with him from 2004 to 2008, prosecutors said. Rogen said that in order to justify sexual acts with his children, Van Dorsten told them that a "female spirit, the spirit of their mother or another spiritual husband" had taken over their bodies.
The six siblings and their father have been living on the farm since 2010, and no one has been born and no children have gone to school, as required by Dutch law.
Van Dorsten is in the prison hospital, but police have not been able to question him, as he is unable to speak after suffering a stroke in 2014 and was not treated.
A second suspect, 58-year-old Austrian Josef Bruner, a fan or accomplice of Van Dorsten who paid rent for the farmhouse, is accused of endangering the health of others and illegal detention.
Source: politis