Germany: Probe launched after police free 8-year-old girl

Officials in western Germany are launching an investigation into the case of an eight-year-old girl who was kept locked in a room for more than seven years of her life.

The probe will examine how child protection services could have missed clues that the child was being hidden by her mother and grandparents in the small town of Attendorn.

What do we know so far?

Officials said the child, known only as Maria, showed no sign of malnutrition or abuse. However, she was reportedly so underdeveloped that she was not able to climb stairs or make her way across uneven ground.

The girl said she had never been in a car or seen a meadow or a forest, authorities said.

Senior prosecutors said that, given the fact that the girl had not been able to leave the house since she was a year-and-a-half, she "cannot have consciously been aware of much of the outside world."

Maria's mother and grandparents have so far declined to answer police questions about why she was kept hidden for so long, according to officials.

The mother, named only as Rosemarie G. and thought to be aged 47, told local authorities in 2015 that she had moved to the southern Italian region of Calabria.

Maria's father told local child services that he had repeatedly seen Maria and her mother in Attendorn in September 2015.

However, child welfare services officials say that, when they spoke to Maria's grandparents in 2015, they were also told that Maria was in Italy.

Child protection authorities said they were repeatedly turned away by the grandparents, and police were also denied access to the home, having never produced an official warrant.

The girl's whereabouts were investigated again in July this year, when police received a tipoff about a rumor that she had been locked away. Relatives of the mother told police that she and the child had never lived in Italy. 

Italian authorities also told youth welfare officers that the child had never lived at the address that the mother had given German officials.  A court order was granted, and the child was eventually found at her grandparents' home.

What happens now?

The child, now nearly nine, has been placed in a foster home. Her mother and grandparents are under investigation for deprivation of liberty, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of 15 years imprisonment.

A separate probe will examine how child protection services could have missed clues that the child was being hidden by her mother and grandparents.

Child welfare officials were said to have received reports that the girl was being kept at the location two years ago and one year ago. However, they said they had no solid evidence to follow up the case.

"We have to shed light on whether the youth welfare office did everything did everything necessary to uncover the case," senior public prosecutor Patrick Baron von Grotthuss told the DPA news agency. "If an eight-year-old girl is presumed to have been hidden in a house for almost seven years, the question inevitably arises as to whether the child could not have been found earlier."