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POLICE in Germany have rescued a seven-year-old girl from a remote farmhouse where she has not seen sunshine or met another person other than her mother since birth.Authorities fear the girl is severely psychiatrically disturbed and she has been handed over to experts in a clinic for treatment. The girl lived as a prisoner in the farmhouse at Ursberg near Augsburg in Bavaria.She had never been allowed out, was kept in darkened rooms and has skin like parchment, according to police. She has no education, has never seen a TV show, listened to a radio, been read a fairy tale or petted a dog.Like the character in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, she is "virtually feral," according to one police officer.Police and welfare officials swooped on the farmhouse last Thursday after receiving a tip-off that the 45-year-old woman was hiding a child in the house.The girl's uncle lives nearby but he has not been arrested. Police believe the woman became a suspect among locals for buying childrens' clothes which led to the tip-off.In a highly bureaucratic country like Germany it is baffling how she managed to have the child without her being registered somewhere.According to reports the house was a rubbish tip of rotting food, paper and tins.
A local newspaper said at least one child living near the farmhouse had glimpsed the child through a window and told her parents:"There is a little girl in the strange house."Prosecutors are pressing cruelty charges against the mother as the investigation widens into how the child's existence could have been a secret for so long.Earlier this year in Austria, three children aged seven to 18 were rescued from a house in Graz in similar circumstances. the eldest is expected to have psychiatric problems for the rest of her life.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=958022007
As in the days of Noah....
