A man who kept his wife and seven children prisoner in a dilapidated house for 20 years and raped them before forcing them to have abortions has been arrested after one of his daughters ran away and reported him.
The unidentified 54-year-old suspect, who lived in Novo Oriente, Minas Gerais, was arrested after one of his daughters gave him sleeping pills so she could escape and report him to the authorities, who carried out an investigation into a month before trespassing on the property.
The police found three fetuses buried in the garden, with the man's wife, also unnamed, but said to be 40 years old, saying that she had lived like this since she was 17, a detail that evoked the horrors of the José Fritzl case in Austria.
He allegedly forced her to have three abortions. One of the fetuses that police found buried was around eight months old.
Police also said one of the daughters suffered an unsuccessful miscarriage of a six-month-old fetus. The baby reportedly survived and was rescued by a midwife.
The girl was reportedly in poor health, but her father refused her any medical help.
Authorities carried out a month-long investigation before raiding the property (photo)
Police rescued seven children aged three to 22
The unidentified 54-year-old suspect, who lived in Novo Oriente, Minas Gerais, was arrested after one of his daughters gave him sleeping pills so she could escape and report him to authorities.
Police rescued seven children aged between three and 22, and investigators said the suspect had sexually abused them and their late mother-in-law.
According to police, the suspect sexually abused his daughters and made holes in the walls of the house to see the girls getting dressed and bathing.
The suspect is in preventive custody and the mother and children have been transferred to another state for their protection.
Police spokeswoman Herika Ribeiro Sena said: 'The victim only left home to receive benefits and was often accompanied by him. None of the neighbors knew her, not even relatives had access to her.'
The man was accused of false imprisonment, rape of a vulnerable person, psychological violence, abortion and concealment of a corpse.
The investigation into the shocking case is ongoing.
It evokes the horror that Josef Fritzl inflicted on his daughter for 24 years, repeatedly imprisoning and raping her and forcing her to give birth to seven incestuous children.
Josef Fritzl is seen during the fourth day of his trial at the St. Poelten rural court in 2009. He was sentenced to life in prison
The 89-year-old was recently transferred from a maximum security hospital wing for the criminally insane in Stein to a regular prison.
Fritzl was arrested in 2009 after admitting raping his daughter Elisabeth (pictured) and fathering seven children with her
Elisabeth was just 18 years old when she disappeared in 1984 and would only reappear in April 2008, when she was discovered in a clandestine cellar beneath her father's house in Amstetten, Austria.
Fritzl had set up his underground prison in a complex manner, which featured a heavy metal door hidden behind a shelf in his workroom.
He made sure only he had access to it, installing a secret keyless code that only he knew – while his wife and six other children, upstairs, knew absolutely nothing about his double life.
He was able to drag his daughter to his lair after knocking his teenage daughter unconscious with a cloth soaked in ether. She was reportedly Fritzl's favorite daughter – and he specifically groomed her to become his sexual partner, after first abusing her when she was just 11 years old.
Elisabeth was manipulated by her father into thinking the door was electrified so that she would be killed if she tried to escape the shocking abuse.
Over the course of her 24 years in prison, Elisabeth became the mother of seven children – three of whom remained in captivity with her.
