French man charged with keeping nine-year-old son locked in van since 2024 | France

A nine-year-old malnourished boy who had been locked in his father’s minibus in eastern France since 2024 has been rescued, a prosecutor said.

In the village of Hagenbach, near the border of Switzerland and Germany, a neighbor reported to the police that “children’s voices” were coming from a vehicle.

Prosecutor Nicolas Heitz said that after forcing open the van on Monday, officers “found a child lying in a fetal position, naked, covered with a blanket, on a pile of garbage and close to feces.”

He added that the child was malnourished and could no longer walk because he had been sitting for so long.

The 43-year-old father told police he had kept the child in the commercial vehicle since November 2024 to protect him from his 37-year-old partner “who wanted to place him in psychiatric care”, the prosecutor said.

The couple lived in an apartment with the boy’s siblings, his 12-year-old sister and his 10-year-old half-sister.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, the boy told the police that his father brought him food twice a day and left bottles of water for him.

He said he had to urinate in plastic bottles and defecate in thousand bags, adding the last time he had a shower was at the end of 2024.

According to the father, his partner did not know that the child was in the minibus.

The man was detained and charged with “isolation and arbitrary detention of a minor” as well as depriving him of adequate food and medical care.

His partner was released on conditional bail on charges of “failure to assist a minor child in danger” and “failure to report maltreatment of a minor child”.

The three children were placed in temporary care pending a juvenile court judge’s decision.

Neighbors told police that the child appeared to have suddenly disappeared at the end of 2024, but they understood from the couple that he had been taken into care.

Some residents said they occasionally heard noises from the minibus, but were told it was a cat.

A neighbor named Danielle described the situation as “truly devastating,” Sky News reported.

He said: “We can’t understand it, it’s terrible, there are no words.”

“I didn’t notice anything, I didn’t hear anything… It feels like we’re living in a movie or a dream and we think, ‘I’ll wake up tomorrow, maybe this isn’t real.’ We just can’t understand it.”