A man has been arrested in France after his wife was found locked naked in a room with her head shaved in what local police are now treating as a suspected decade-long kidnap and torture, according to reports.
French news channel BFM reported that the 55-year-old German national had been detained at his home in Forbach, near the French border with Germany, on Monday after his 53-year-old wife managed to tell the authorities that she was being held against her will since 2011.
The outlet said officers had responded to an address in the town earlier in the morning, but had been refused entry to the property.
After breaking down the door, they found the woman in a state of distress, who also appeared malnourished with fractured bones in her legs and fingers. The woman has now been hospitalized, according to BFM.
Officers had reportedly found a notebook, believed to belong to the man, which recorded when he fed the woman, and what it described as a torture bench. Neither the husband nor the wife have been publicly named.
Newsweek reached out to the police department in Forbach via email for comment on Monday.
Forbach, a small town in the northeastern Grand Est region of France, sits just a short drive over the border from Saarbrucken, the capital of the German state of Saarland.
It is not the first time that the sleepy region has been witness to the apparent kidnap of a wife by their husband.
In 2021, a 50-year-old man killed his wife before taking his own life with a gun after holding her hostage at the home she shared with their adolescent children, RTL reported at the time.
Local prosecutors said at the time they believed it to be a case of femicide which occurred on the backdrop of a divorce.
RTL said the man had let his children go—who had then raised the alarm, prompting the dispatch of armed units from Paris. However, when officers breached the door, they found the former couple dead inside.
The same year, millionaire Lawrence Michael Handley pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges in Lafayette, Louisiana, after hiring two men, who subsequently drowned evading police capture, to abduct his estranged wife, the Lafayette Advertiser reported at the time.
Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide who are abducted have an intimate relationship with the abductor, according to the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative.
Update 08/07/23, 8:50 a.m. ET: This article was updated with further details throughout.
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