Police in Pakistan arrested a man accused of keeping his wife and children hostage for over a decade. The man reportedly abused them physically and mentally on a daily basis, according to the French wife, Sylvie Yasmina.
Yasmina said a son managed to escape and file a police report, which led to a raid of their house in Bara, a remote town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Police found Yasmina and her five children in a cramped, dilapidated room. They bore bruises all over their bodies and appeared to have been deprived of basic freedoms for years.
The family has been taken to a women’s shelter in Peshawar, where authorities plan to support them as they prepare to return to France.
Yasmina’s husband, a Pakistani who had lived illegally in Australia when they met, is alleged to have “effectively imprisoned” the family since the couple moved there in 2014. He married Yasmina in 2003, and the couple had two older children who missed school and three younger children who were born in Pakistan but never enrolled.
In a statement to police, Yasmina described how her husband beat them and inflicted daily pressure on their lives, causing a sense that the future for her and the children was ruined.
Severely restricted, the family had no communication with the outside world until police intervention. The police say the husband’s illegal residency in Australia adds a complex dimension to the case.
