A 25-year-old man’s claim that he escaped from the hidden basement of an isolated Dutch farmhouse where he and his five younger siblings lived with a 58-year-old man for nearly 10 years while awaiting the world’s end has left authorities scrambling to fill in the details of his story.
Among the many unanswered questions:
What is the relationship between the older man and the six siblings?
They allegedly had no contact with the outside world and lived self-sufficiently off their vegetable garden and livestock while anticipating “the end of time,” according to the news channel.
While multiple outlets have reported that the elder man was the father of the children, Ruinerwold Mayor Roger de Grootsaid during a press conferencethat the man was not related to the siblings, nor was he the owner of the rented farmhouse.
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Had anyone been looking for the children?
The siblings were not registered anywhere, and the 25-year-old said he’d never attended school, according to Chris Westerbeek, the Ruinerwold pub owner who struck up a conversation with the man after he entered his establishment Sunday evening and subsequently ordered five beers,BBC News reports.
“I had a chat with him and he revealed he had run away and needed help … then we called the police,” Westerbeek said, according to the outlet. “He had long hair, a dirty beard, wore old clothes and looked confused. He said he’d never been to school and hadn’t been to the barber for nine years.”
“He said he had brothers and sisters who lived at the farm,” Westerbeek said. “He said he was the oldest and wanted to end the way they were living.”
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It was not clear how the 25-year-old made his way into town, how far he traveled, why he picked the pub as a stop, or where he’d obtained money to purchase his beverages.
Mayor de Groot said during his press conference that it is believed the siblings’ mother had died years before they moved into the farmhouse.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told local reporters, adding that the siblings were in “a safe place” now.
Were they actually being held against their will?
“We knew absolutely nothing of this. We had rented the house for years to an individual and now we learn that a man was living there with children. We have no idea who this can be,” they told the local outlet.
With apparent access outdoors to the garden and farm animals, authorities are working to determine what might have kept the siblings anchored to the property, why they remained living underground for so long, and whether any criminal charges will be pressed against the 58-year-old man.
“Part of our investigation is to find out what the people in that house were doing exactly,” police spokesperson Nathalie Schubart toldThe Guardian. “There are still many questions to which we have no answers. The investigation is still going on.”
source: people.com
