Yzabelle Bostyn
A MAN has been arrested in Mallorca after allegedly keeping a 12-year-old girl as a sex slave in his cellar for five years.
The 49-year-old is accused of holding his stepdaughter hostage since 2019 when she seven years old, locking her in a ‘cellar hole’ underneath his desk.
According to Antena3, the man travelled to an ‘African country’ in 2015 posing as a philanthropist, where he ‘lured’ the child’s mother to Spain under the guide of a better life.
Once he had married her mother and moved to Mallorca, the man insisted the little girl live alone with him while the mother lived in another flat.
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TeleMadrid claims his justification for this setup was that it would ‘make it easier to bring the rest of her daughters over from Africa.’
This enabled him to take advantage of his stepdaughter, frequently sexually abusing her.
The man reportedly threatened to send the girl and her mother back to Africa so that she would keep quiet.
According to the Civil Guard, she obeyed out of fear of disappointing her family and not being able to give her sisters a better future in Spain.
However, when she discovered her stepfather had begun the process of bringing her sisters to Mallorca, she reached out to Hermanas Oblatas, a nun’s order known for their work helping vulnerable women.
They then alerted the Civil Guard, leading to the man’s arrest on Friday, May 24.
Once searching his home, the officers discovered evidence of child pornography.
They also found a crawl space under a desk with a ladder leading to a basement, believed to be where the young girl was held.
A video shared by the Guardia Civil shows security cameras on the ceiling and a collection of discs in the man’s home.
The man is then seen being escorted into a Guardia Civil vehicle.
This case echoes the kidnapping and enslavement of Natascha Kampusch in Austria.
At age 10, she was taken while walking to school and held in a cellar between 1998 and 2006.
She claims she was beaten, starved and turned into a sex slave during this time.
After eight years of captivity she managed to escape in 2006 while cleaning her captor’s car.
Hours later, her abductor Wolfgang Priklopil’s body was found decapitated on a nearby train line.
