A 21-year-old mother and her 24-year-old companion were indicted and remanded in custody for acts of torture and barbarism on their four-year-old child, the Bourges prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.
The boy’s mother and stepfather admitted to having locked him up “for sometimes several days by depriving him of water and food, then having tied him by the neck to his bed with a chain. and padlocks,” said public prosecutor Joël Garrigue in a press release.
The four-and-a-half-year-old boy was also subjected “to repeated acts of violence and physical punishment since September 2021”, according to the same source.
The child was the victim of bullying, blows and slaps before being locked in his room, without water and without food or the possibility of going to the toilet. He was also schooled in dotted line.
The facts were discovered Monday, January 17 following a malaise of the little boy at school, having led to his hospitalization at the Bourges hospital center. It was then that the medical examiner at the hospital discovered “traumatic lesions”, “bruises on the limbs and in the back”, as well as a “wound on the scalp”.
In “a state of very great thinness”, he was entrusted to the services of the Childhood Social Assistance, with his one-year-old little sister, “who seems not to have been subjected to violence”, according to the prosecution.
The investigation was entrusted to the gendarmerie of Saint-Armand-Montrond (Cher), 40 km south of Bourges, further indicated the prosecution, which opened a judicial investigation for “deprivation of care or food”, “violence against a minor” and “torture or act of barbarism against a minor”.
The mother and her companion face a 30-year prison sentence in view of the offenses with which they are accused.