Boy 'skinned and eaten' by his cannibal cult family after being held captive in a cellar



00:59, 21 June 2008

An eight year-old boy was skinned and his flesh fed to cannibal relatives after his mother kept him locked in a cellar, a court has heard.

Evil Klara Mauerova - a member of a sinister religious cult - wept in court as she admitted torturing her son Ondrej and his ten year-old brother Jakub.

The court also heard allegations that relatives had partially skinned eight-year-old Ondrej and then eaten the raw human flesh.

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

Horror: Klara Mauerova, left, and Barbara Skrlova with Jakub and Ondrej

The court heard how the family had sexually abused them and even made them cut themselves with knives. They 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 man in Brno in the Czech Republic installed a TV baby monitor to keep watch on his newborn child.

But it picked up a signal from an identical monitor next door showing one of the victims beaten, naked and chained in a cellar.

Sick Mauerova is understood to have intalled it so she could gloat over her victims' suffering from the comfort of her kitchen.

Held: Barbara Skrlova in the wool hat after her arrest in Norway

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 the 13-year-old, who had been formally adopted, was really 34-year-old Barbora Skrlova - one of the children's torturers.

She later ran away to Norway but was found earlier this year by Czech cops who brought her back to the Czech Republic to face trial.

Her "brother", eight-year-old Ondrej, had been locked and chained in the cellar by his mother Klara for months.

He had been gagged so he could not scream and beaten as well. It later emerged his brother Jakub had also been abused.

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

Katerina Mauerova and Skrlova and another relative are all accused of involvement in the abuse of the boys.

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



