A Czech mother who tortured her son in a locked cellar while relatives skinned him and forced him to eat his own flesh has been jailed for nine years. Her sister got ten years in jail. They belonged to a cannibal cult.
Actually two sons of 31-year-old Klara Mauerova, Jakub (10) and Ondrej (8), underwent inhuman ordeal at the hands of the cult members, though only Ondrej was made to eat his own flesh, it transpires.
According to testimonies at the Brno Municipal Court, the abuse - allegedly carried out to varying degrees by all six defendants - involved keeping the boys in dog kennels, while they were made to recite obscene texts, and to cut and burn each other with cigarettes. At times, the boys were allegedly made to lay in shallow graves. At one point, flesh was cut from Ondrej's buttocks and he was forced-fed with the pieces.
Jakub and Ondrej told judges how their mother, her sister Katerina, 35, and other relatives used to whip them with belts and tried to drown them.
The terrified youngsters said they were kept in cages or handcuffed to tables and made to stand in their own urine for days.
The sick abuse was discovered when a neighbour installed a TV baby monitor to keep watch on his new daughter.
But it picked up the signal from an identical monitor next door showing one of the victims beaten, naked and chained in a cellar.