Inside doomsday cult where father of 9 was locked in kennel before apocalypse – World News

Twisted father-of-nine Gerrit Jan van Dorsten reproached his children for food and physical abuse over fears they had been “unclean” by “evil spirits” in their remote home in the Netherlands

A distorted father caged and abused his children for more than a decade, keeping one of them in a kennel because he thought the world was ending, a court has heard.

The father-of-9 regularly beat his children and refused them food – believing it would help “stop evil spirits” because they were “unclean”.

Gerrit Jan Van Dorsten, 67, was finally arrested in October 2019 after his son went into a bar in a rural village in the Netherlands, where employees sounded the alarm.

Dutch police officers stormed the house of horrors and rescued the remaining children.

Van Dorsten was arrested and charged with “very serious corporal punishment”.

His son Jan told the bar staff that he and his family hadn’t left the house in nine years and had been patiently waiting for the apocalypse.

It then emerged that van Dorsten had been holding his prisoners, aged 18 and 25 at the time of his arrest, in makeshift cells in a hidden dungeon.

Court hearings detail the horrific abuse van Dorsten inflicted on children, including a boy who was punished by having his hands and feet tied.

Another spent the summer trapped in a doghouse after being forced to live in a trailer separate from the rest of the family, prosecutors claimed.

A 61-year-old Austrian handyman, described as a “student” of van Dorsten, was jailed this week for helping isolate the children.

Dubbed Joseph B due to Dutch data protection regulations, he bought the family’s groceries and the court was told that without his contribution it would not have been possible to isolate the children from society for so long.

However, the Assen City Court acquitted Joseph B. of arresting three older children and abusing one of van Dorsten’s children.

Van Dorsten himself was considered too ill for a trial after suffering a stroke.

However, the ailing father has been accused of depriving the children of their liberty from 2007 to 2019, as well as alleged sexual abuse of two of his older three children.

Prosecutors said the youngest six of the nine children “lived in seclusion from birth, were kept indoors and had to be quiet lest anyone realize they existed”.

The children, who had never attended school, were not registered with Dutch authorities and had been isolated for so long that they had lost the ability to speak properly, speaking bizarre “fantasy language” to shocked police officers, the lawyers said.