Police in Pakistan have arrested a man who allegedly kept his wife and children captive in their home and abused them for more than a decade. This is reported by the BBC.

His wife, a French national named Sylvie Yasmina, claims that the man subjected the family to physical and psychological abuse “every single day” and described him as “very violent”, local police said.

One of their sons managed to slip out to report the case to the police, leading to a raid on their house in Bara, a remote town in the mountainous province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Afghanistan.

Police found Yasmina and her five children in a cramped and “extremely dilapidated room”, with bruises all over their bodies.

Yasmina and her children have been taken to a women’s shelter in Peshawar. They are planning to move back to France, police said.

According to Yasmina, 54, her husband had “effectively kept the family captive” since they moved to Pakistan from Australia in 2014.

“According to the woman… she was not allowed to meet anyone, the two eldest children had missed out on schooling, while the three youngest children were born in Pakistan and were never enrolled in school,” a senior police officer told BBC Urdu.

The authorities have not identified Yasmina’s husband, a Pakistani national whom they say “was residing illegally” in Australia when the couple met.

They married in 2003 and lived in Australia until 2014, when they moved to Pakistan with their two eldest children. Yasmina claims that she has had no contact with the outside world since then.

“We were deprived of [our] freedom; my husband did not take care of us as he should have as a husband and the father of my children. He beats us and puts pressure on us every single day,” Yasmina wrote in her statement to the police, parts of which have been published by local media.

“I felt that my future had already been ruined, and that my children’s future would also be ruined.”