Problem Children Locked Up in Pig Pens, Spanish Police Say

Swiss teenagers sent to a centre for problem children based at a remote Spanish farmhouse were allegedly locked up in pig pens and kept on a diet of milk and muesli if they misbehaved, according to police.

The case came to light after some of the children ran away and one was found at a nearby railway station.

Police in the north-eastern town of Sant Llorenç de la Muga arrested three people who had been running the centre and accused them of illegally detaining children and using physical and psychological violence against them. "Those in charge of the centre allegedly mistreated the children daily, shutting them up for days on end in pig pens if they did not want to work or worked poorly," a Spanish police statement said. "Some children were shut up eight hours a day in the pig pens for three months," it added. Police said other children were allegedly confined in a space measuring one square metre.

The centre reportedly charged Swiss parents - who used the farm as a last resort for troublesome children aged 14 to 17 - €4,000 (£2,790) a month to put them through a course of hard physical work and punishments for disobedience. Police found that five children had been staying at the farm, where they slept in rundown converted caravans as bedrooms.

The centre was run by a Swiss man named as Armin Schlegel, his French wife and a 60-year-old Italian man. A magistrate has freed them while investigations continue and formal charges are prepared.

"I have never hit a child," Mr Schlegel told El País newspaper yesterday, as he posed for photographers wearing a woman's wig. "The only punishment I allow is for them to be locked in the toilet for a couple of hours." He denied locking them in pig cages.

He said he had the support of the children's parents and that he and his wife were recognised as temporary foster parents by the Swiss authorities. More than 100 children were thought to have visited the farmhouse, where, Mr Schlegel said they learned how to look after animals, work the soil and operate a motorised saw.