A seven-year-old boy was kept chained in a closet as relatives hacked off pieces of his flesh to eat, a court has heard.

In a case with echoes of the Fritzl family horror in Austria, Ondrej Mauerova was partially skinned in the closet in a cellar at his home in Kurim near Brno, in the Czech Republic, according to reports.

The abuse – involving members of a religious cult – was uncovered by chance last May when a neighbour's television baby monitor picked up graphic pictures of what was happening next door.

Ondrej and his nine-year-old brother Jakub were locked and chained in the cellar for months by their mother Klara, 31 – a member of a group called the Grail Movement.

He was caged, beaten and gagged to stop him screaming, according to reports.

Mauerova had the monitor installed so that she could watch the abuse from her kitchen but the images were picked up by a neighbour who used an identical system to monitor a newborn baby, the regional court in Brno has heard.

Police were called and the two boys as well as what appeared to be a 13-year-old girl were freed.

But the girl later turned out to have been one of the alleged abusers, 34-year-old Barbora Skrlova.

She subsequently fled to Norway before being brought back to the Czech Republic earlier this year.

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

The accused are Klara Mauerova, her sister Katerina, 34; Barbora Skrlova, 33; her brother Jan Skrla and a friend Jan Turek.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/czechrepublic/2162250/%27Cannibal-relatives-ate-boy-alive%27.html#continue

death sentence please.

People are so cold it's saddening.

its really hard to believe monsters like these exist.

off-topic, how does hyper linking work in this site?

... wtf?!?

seriously this world is no longer human! i don't understand things like this and i never will. in situations like this i agree with the death sentence

wow, thats just wrong

In situations like this I don't agree with the death penalty.  Why you may ask?  Because the death penalty is painless.

This would be much more suitable for this situation.  Have something slowly eat them like they did to the victim.

Scaphism, also known as the boats, is an ancient Persian method of execution designed to inflict torturous death. The name comes from the Greek word skaphe, meaning "scooped (or hollowed) out" and from Latin word meaning "boats".

The naked person would be firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowboats (or in some variations a hollowed out tree trunk), the head, hands, and feet protruding from this improvised container. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be rubbed on his body so as to attract insects to the exposed appendages. They would then be left to float on a stagnant pond (or alternately, simply exposed to the sun somewhere). The defenseless individual's feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed (and increasingly gangrenous) flesh. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock. Insanity would typically set in after a few days.

In other recorded versions, the insects did not eat the person; biting and stinging insects such as wasps, which were attracted by honey on the body, acted as the torture.

Death by scaphism is painful, humiliating, and protracted. Plutarch writes in Artaxerxes that Mithridates, sentenced to die in this manner for killing Cyrus the Younger, survived 17 days before dying.^[1]

Hmmmm I think we already knew the world is pathetically messed up.

Sick.