Europe 1 with AFP 9:39 p.m., January 22, 2022, modified at 9:40 p.m., January 22, 2022

The four-and-a-half-year-old boy was also subjected "to repeated acts of violence and physical punishment since September 2021", according to the same source. In "a state of very great thinness", he was entrusted to the services of the Childhood Social Assistance, as well as his one-year-old sister.

A 24-year-old man and his 21-year-old girlfriend were indicted and remanded in custody for acts of torture and barbarity on their four-year-old child, the Bourges prosecutor's office announced on Saturday.

The parents admitted to having "locked up the child for sometimes several days, depriving him of water and food, then having tied him by the neck to his bed using a chain and padlock", specified the public prosecutor Joël Garrigue in a press release.

The four-and-a-half-year-old boy was also subjected "to repeated acts of violence and physical punishment since September 2021", according to the same source.

Entrusted to ASE

The child was hospitalized on Monday at the Bourges hospital center after feeling unwell at the primary school in which he is educated.

It was then that the medical examiner at the hospital discovered "traumatic lesions", "bruises on the limbs and in the back", as well as a "wound on the scalp". 

In "a state of very great thinness", he was entrusted to the services of the Childhood Social Assistance, as well as his one-year-old sister, "who seems not to have suffered any violence", according to the prosecution.