Three children were dramatically rescued from a COVID lockdown house of horrors after being forced for years to stay inside and wear face masks long after pandemic restrictions ended.
The siblings — 8-year-old twins and a 10-year-old — were finally freed from the home in Oviedo in Spain’s northwest on Monday after being locked inside since 2021, local outlet El Comercio reported.
“As soon as we got them out, all three children began to breathe deeply, as if they had never been outside before,” an investigator said.
Harrowing photos published by Spanish media showed the kids, who are German, emerging from the home wearing face masks.
Immediately after stepping outside, cops said, the children appeared to be amazed and went to touch the grass.
The children’s parents, only identified as a 48-year-old German-American woman and her 53-year-old German husband, were arrested and slapped with domestic violence and child abandonment charges.
Investigators said the parents were suffering from “COVID syndrome” and had allegedly forced the entire family to live under strict lockdown conditions for several years.
Cops made the grim discovery after neighbors reported that the children living inside hadn’t been going to school.
“The children were in terrible shape. It was absolutely outrageous,” an investigator told El Mundo.
“Not malnourished, because they were fed. But they were also dirty … [and] completely cut off from reality, and not just because they didn’t go to school.”
“When we took them out of the house, into the garden, where they wouldn’t even go outside, they saw a snail and went crazy, freaked out.”
