A seventy-year-old is suspected of having kidnapped his 39-year-old son in an attic and deprived of food for several months in a small village in the Upper Rhine, France. Arrested on charges of holding his son hostage for at least “four months”, the man will be brought before the judge.
The case broke out on Wednesday evening, when the gendarmes were called for a story of violence: a woman reported that her husband had been shot by her son in Malmerspach, a town of about 500 souls, about thirty kilometers away from Mulhouse , in the east of France.
The 39-year-old, who admitted to hitting his father, was taken to the emergency room in Mulhouse to check his health. Along the way, however, the man said he didn’t feel very well, nor had he eaten enough lately. In the hospital, his state of extreme thinness, which evoked “images of prisoners in the camps”, shocked the doctors: sunken face, protruding ribs. Questioned, he explained that he had returned to his parents’ home about a year ago after losing work. The father, judging that his son was doing nothing to get by, had therefore decided to lock him in the attic, forbidding him to go down to eat.
Driven by hunger, he said he tried to sneak out of the attic at night to eat the leftovers. But his father, who had noticed, had blocked him. Exhausted, the 39-year-old ended up beating his father. When questioned by the agents, the neighbors said they hadn’t even noticed the son’s return.
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