A man and woman have been charged with kidnapping and torture after allegedly keeping a 45-year-old woman prisoner in her own garage for five years.
The victim is said to have lost 50kg during the ordeal, in which she was allegedly bathed in bleach, forced to defecate in urinals and plastic bags and forced to eat porridge with dish soap.
Her bank account and social security benefits were also emptied while she was held prisoner in a garage in a village near Sanit-Molf in the Loire-Atlantique in western France, according to FranceBleu.
He managed to escape on October 14 when he knocked on a neighbor’s door asking for help around 9:30 p.m., while one of his alleged captors was watching television, prosecutors said.
Police have since arrested an 82-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman and charged them with “kidnapping with torture or barbaric acts.” Authorities have not named the victim or suspects.
The victim shared a flat with another woman who worked as a nursing assistant at the nearby Guérande hospital. Her roommate met an older man, who subsequently moved into the property.
Nantes prosecutor Antoine Leroy explained that at that time the victim was locked in a tent in the garden and then taken to live in the garage, where he slept on a deck chair.
Investigators discovered evidence that the garage door had been “blocked from the outside by concrete blocks,” Leroy said. The woman was also allegedly outside for days in the rain or cold and was suffering from hypothermia when she was saved.
“They washed her with bleach, there was dish soap in her food, they drugged her with medications,” said a source close to the investigation. FranceBleu.
The neighbor who opened the door said she hadn’t seen her in years and thought she had left the area.
“You don’t leave someone out in physical and psychological distress,” the neighbor said. “I took her inside, I covered her, I gave her water. It was very complicated. She was someone in trouble. I saved this woman, I gave her assistance, that’s all.”
Leroy stated that the victim is a “particularly psychologically fragile woman and therefore in a vulnerable state”, otherwise she could have “defended herself in another way”. She left the house several times but kept coming back, he added.
Authorities said the woman had “disappeared from the radar” since April 2022. Her bank accounts showed “a sudden break in her lifestyle” from that date.
“His bank accounts were no longer active except when he paid large sums of money” to the couple, prosecutors said. Le Parisien.
The man and woman living at the property, who were arrested last week, have since been charged with “criminal acts of kidnapping with torture or acts of barbarism,” as well as “fraudulent abuse” of a person’s psychological or physical subjugation status” and “weakness of a vulnerable person.”
The woman is in preventive detention, while the man is under judicial supervision.
An investigation is still underway.