Three young children — twin 8-year-olds and their 10-year-old sibling — have been rescued from a suburban home in Spain where they had been kept in near-total isolation for years under obsessive and outdated COVID restrictions.

Authorities in Oviedo, a city in Spain’s northwest, were alerted after neighbors reported the children had not been seen attending school since 2021. What investigators uncovered was described as a “house of horrors” — not in terms of physical abuse, but in the extreme psychological and social deprivation the children were subjected to.

According to Spanish outlets El Comercio and El Mundo, the German children, whose parents had relocated to Spain, were forced to wear face masks inside their own home and were never allowed to go outside, even long after pandemic restrictions had been lifted nationwide.

“As soon as we got them out, all three children began to breathe deeply, as if they had never been outside before,” one investigator told El Comercio. Police said the children were wide-eyed and overwhelmed, staring in awe at the garden and touching the grass as if seeing it for the first time.

Photographs released by Spanish media show the children emerging from the house still wearing surgical masks. Authorities described them as dirty, disoriented, and emotionally stunted, though not malnourished.

“The children were in terrible shape. It was absolutely outrageous,” an officer told El Mundo. “They were completely cut off from reality. They didn’t even know how to behave outdoors. One of them saw a snail in the garden and completely panicked.”

The parents — a 48-year-old German-American woman and her 53-year-old German husband — were arrested and charged with domestic violence and child abandonment. Authorities believe both were suffering from what has been dubbed “COVID syndrome” — an obsessive, pathological fear of the virus that led them to impose extreme lockdown conditions on the entire family for multiple years.

The children are now in the care of social services and undergoing psychological evaluation. Local officials say the case is being treated with the utmost seriousness and are calling it one of the most disturbing examples of pandemic-related trauma seen to date.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)