Dutch farm dad 'beat bad spirits out of kids'

A Dutchman isolated six of his children in a remote farmhouse from birth and beat them to drive out "bad spirits" from the outside world, prosecutors told a court on Tuesday.

Gerrit Jan van D., 67, subjected the youngsters who were found on the farm in the village of Ruinerwold in October to "very serious physical punishment" when he thought they had been made "unclean".

One child was tied up by his hands and feet as punishment, while another child was forced to spend an entire summer in a doghouse at the farm in northern Drenthe province.

"The children all speak of very serious physical punishment if their father thought there was a 'bad spirit' in them. That happened from a very young age, four or five years," prosecutors said during a procedural hearing in the case.

Prosecutors said the youngest six of the man's nine children "lived in seclusion from birth, were kept indoors and had to be quiet so that no one would notice that they existed."