The facts are untenable. A 24-year-old man and his 21-year-old girlfriend were indicted and remanded in custody for acts of torture and barbarity on their four-year-old child, the Bourges prosecutor’s office announced on Saturday.
The parents admitted to having “locked up the child for sometimes several days by depriving him of water and food, then having tied him by the neck to his bed using a chain and a padlock”, said the public prosecutor Joël Garrigue in a press release.
The four-and-a-half-year-old boy was also submissive “to repeated acts of violence and physical punishment since September 2021”, according to the same source.
“Traumatic injuries”, “bruises”, “great thinness”
The child was hospitalized on Monday January 17 at the Bourges hospital center after feeling unwell at the primary school in which he is educated. It was then that the medical examiner at the hospital discovered “traumatic injuries”, from “bruises on the limbs and on the back”, as well as a “scalp sore”.
In “a state of very great thinness”, he was entrusted to the Child Welfare Services, along with his one-year-old sister, “who seems not to have been subjected to violence”, according to the prosecution.