An Austrian woman is being investigated for the attempted murder and torture of her 12-year-old son. By all indications, the suspect will have it the child in a small cage for dogs and exposed him to negative temperatures, authorities said on Tuesday.
The case sparked a public scandal in Austria when it was made public earlier this week, following the Supreme Court’s decision in late May to dismiss the woman’s complaint against her several months’ detention.
The 32-year-old woman “remains in custody and the investigation is expected to be concluded by the end of the summer, with a possible charge,” Johann Baumschlager, police spokesman for the province of Lower Austria, told AFP on Tuesday.
The woman has been detained in Krems, west of Vienna, since November last year after a social worker called an ambulance to the home on November 22 to take the comatose and hypothermic boy she found there to hospital.. The Austrian authorities, who sent the social worker to the house, will have been informed by the boy’s father, who lives separately.
The hospital filed a criminal complaint, which led to the woman’s arrest the following day.
The woman is suspected of wetting her son with cold water several times a day and opening the windows of the apartment for several hours in negative temperatures, causing his body temperature to drop to 26.8 degrees Celsius.
Severe malnutrition left the boy in a coma, resulting in an “acute life-threatening situation” before emergency services were alerted by the social worker, the Supreme Court ruling said. The boy’s physical condition has since improved, but “psychologically he is still broken,” Baumschlager told AFP.
Source: DN
