A German court on Thursday condemned a 46-year-old man to indefinite imprisonment for sexually abusing a teenager who maintained hidden for more than two years and the police found in a closet.
A court of Bochum condemned the defendant, identified as Lars H., nine years in prison followed by preventive detention, after declaring him guilty of more than 400 fees of sexual abuse of minors.
Preventive detention is one of the most severe sanctions of the Germany’s criminal system, conceived to keep criminals considered too dangerous in prison, even after having fulfilled their official conviction.
The victim was 13 years old when he disappeared from the host center for young people in which he lived, in June 2017.
The court learned that he met the suspect on an online conversation platform and who had agreed to go to his apartment, in the city of Recklinghausen (West).
The suspect affirmed that he had asked the child to move with him and had rewarded him with money and cigarettes by sexual favors, but the judge rejected the statement of the accused that it was a consensual relationship.
The boy gave three days of testimony during the trial.
A spokesman for the court said that the defendant had abused the child at least 445 times, before being discovered by accident in December 2019 during a police record for suspicions that the individual spread child pornography.
The officers found the child in the one bedroom closet.
