Abused boys 'had skin hacked off and eaten by relatives'

Published on Thursday 19 June 2008 22:12

A COURT has heard a horrifying tale of human cannibalism involving an eight-year-old boy who was tortured and partially skinned.

Klara Mauerova – a member of a sinister religious cult – wept as she admitted torturing her son Ondrej and his ten-year-old brother, Jakub. It is alleged pieces of their flesh were hacked off to be eaten by their relatives.

The two boys told how their mother and other relatives had stubbed out cigarettes on their bare skin, whipped them with belts and tried to drown them.

The court in the Czech Republic heard the family sexually abused the boys and made them cut themselves with knives. The boys said they were kept in cages or handcuffed to tables and made to stand for days in their own urine.

The abuse was discovered when a man in the city of Brno installed a TV monitor to keep watch on his newborn baby. It picked up a signal from an identical monitor next door showing one of the victims beaten, naked and chained in a cellar.

Mauerova is understood to have installed the monitor so she could watch her victims suffering from her kitchen.

Police were called, and the boy and his brother, as well as what appeared to be a 13-year-old girl, were freed.

At that time police did not realise that the "girl", who had been formally adopted, was in fact 34-year-old Barbora Skrlova – one of the children's torturers. She ran away to Norway but was found this year by Czech police, who brought her back to face trial.

Her "brother", Ondrej, had been locked and chained in the cellar by his mother for months. He had been gagged so he could not scream, and beaten as well. It later emerged Jakub had also been abused.

Mauerova has admitted abusing her children, but she said she had been manipulated by her sisters, Katerina and Skrlova.

All three of them had been part of a cult called the Grail Movement, which claims to have hundreds of followers in Britain as well as tens of thousands of others worldwide.

The court has heard claims the abuse of the boys was co- ordinated by a man known as the "Doctor", who sent mobile phone text messages to the Mauerova sisters telling them how to abuse the two boys.

The trial continues.