17 years of torture!
Brazilian held his wife and sons in this room
It sounds like a Hollywood horror film, but it’s the bitter reality: a father held his wife and two sons like prisoners for almost 20 years. Now the police have freed the victims.
They were dehydrated and starving when the police found them. Now the horror for a mother and her two sons is over. They were finally freed. She had locked up Luiz S.* for 17 years.
The police arrested the woman’s husband and father of the sons following an anonymous tip in the poor district of Guaratiba in western Rio de Janeiro and freed the family, the authorities said on Friday. According to the police, the two sons were “tied up, dirty and malnourished”.
She and her mother were taken to a hospital, dehydrated and starving. According to media reports, the sons are 19 and 22 years old, but look like children or teenagers in pictures published by Brazilian media.
He played loud music to cover calls for help
According to the news portal “G1”, the mother told the authorities that she and her sons sometimes had nothing to eat for three days and were constantly exposed to physical and psychological violence. The man she had been with for 23 years wouldn’t let his wife work and his sons wouldn’t go to school. “You have to stay with me until the end, you’ll only get out of here dead,” he is said to have told his wife.
“We saw the condition the two children came out in and I don’t think they would have survived another week,” a Guaratiba resident told G1. The mother was so weak that she might not even speak.
Neighbors told media the man was nicknamed “DJ” because he always played loud music – presumably to cover calls for help from his family. Residents also said they had alerted the authorities two years ago, but they only acted now. According to “G1”, the man will have to answer for kidnapping, torture and ill-treatment, among other things. (AFP/jmh)
* Name known
