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A foreign man and a woman, 48 and 53, respectively, have been remanded in a specialised, isolation prison unit after the Guardia Civil charged them with the crimes of domestic violence with habitual psychological abuse and abandonment of minors. The victims were their three children, between the ages of 8 and 10, who they confined for four years in what has already been dubbed a 'house of horrors' in the Naranco mountain range in Oviedo in Spain's Asturias region. The children lived in inhumane conditions and dirt, among rubbish and packages of medicines, without access to the outside or fresh air.
The investigation started after a concerned local resident called the family and childhood unit of the regional department of education on 14 April, during the Easter school break. Her report was forwarded to the Oviedo Local Police force, after which a "stealthy and discreet surveillance" was launched in the area around the rural house. The lack of movement outside the house and the large shopping orders from the supermarket for an address where only the father was registered as a resident increasingly suggested that something strange was going on inside. After several days of investigation, officers gathered more evidence, pointing to the presence of minors, who were not enrolled in school, locked inside the house. Following the guidelines of the public prosecutor's office, the Local Police entered the house at 11.15am on the Monday of the nationwide blackout - 28 April.
It was the father who opened the door. He demanded that the officers put face masks on before entering the house. The children inside were wearing three masks, one on top of each other. The officers discovered a clearly unsanitary situation in the house - one "that could endanger the health and integrity of the children", with too many boxes of medicines and a lot of dirt.
What the police saw did not match the parents' intention to protect the health of their children by not allowing them access to the outside world. The minors had been kept locked up since the sixth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021: some four years of solitude and complete isolation.
The three children were taken to the Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias for the first medical assessment. At the time, they were still accompanied by their mother, who was discreetly detained without them witnessing it. The father had already been arrested at the house.
On Wednesday 30 April, the Guardia Civil transferred the couple to the Asturias prison, where they face a long stay. Both arrived with only the clothes on their backs and the masks on their faces. The children's mother, an American with a German passport, was taken directly to the therapeutic unit (UTE). The father, a "corpulent" 53-year-old German, also spent the first few days in the UTE, following an assessment. Contact between them is now restricted and supervised.
Each of them has been incorporated into a small group of 15 to 20 people - a kind of prison "bubble", more civilised than the confinement to which they subjected their children.
The minors have been placed under the guardianship of the regional ministry of social well-being. They are "well", although they are yet to be properly evaluated by psychologists, which will determine the extent of the emotional toll.
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