An eight-year-old German girl has been freed after she was allegedly locked away by her mother and grandparents for seven years, leaving her so weak that she was scarcely able to climb stairs by herself.
The child, known only by the pseudonym Maria, is believed to have vanished in 2015 when she was about 18 months old, and to have spent most of her life confined to a single room at her grandparents’ house in Attendorn, a small town in the Sauerland hills east of Cologne.
She bore no signs of physical abuse or malnutrition but her muscles were severely underdeveloped and she appeared not to have been out in the light of day since she was a toddler.
She told the youth workers who
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