Man had five children with captive stepdaughter

MEXICO City prosecutors have arrested a man who allegedly kept his two teenage stepdaughters captive for five years, fathered five children with one of them, then killed the other woman and one of the babies.

Jorge Iniestra, 32, a part-time taxi driver, started a relationship with a school worker in 2004 but soon fixated on her two young daughters, authorities said.

In a chilling parallel to Austrian Josef Fritzl, he pulled the girls out of school and barred them from going outside, eventually locking them in a single, filthy room in his mother’s house.

Iniestra beat one of the teens to death in 2009 and asphyxiated a 3-month-old boy he fathered with her sister by forcing the baby to nurse from the dead girl’s body, prosecutor Miguel Angel Mancera said.

Prosecutors said Iniestra kept the bodies in his mother’s home in the poor, crowded borough of Iztapalapa for a month, before he and a brother dumped them on a road leading to neighbouring Mexico State.

Jorge Ferman, Mexico City prosecutor for crimes against children, said auth-orities rescued a 3-month-old boy who had been severely beaten and is in critical condition.

They also freed the surviving sister, now 21, and three other children, ages 2, 4 and 5, she had with Iniestra.

“This is an imprisonment story, a story of captivity,” Ferman told reporters during a visit to the room where Iniestra allegedly kept the two women and five children.

The women’s mother, Claudia Tapia, was Iniestra’s girlfriend and she recently denounced him to police, Ferman said.

Police arrested Tapia, Iniestra, his mother and several of his siblings earlier this week. They arrested Tapia for covering up the abuse.

Tapia, a 44-year-old school janitor, began a relationship with Iniestra in 2004, when he moved in with her, her two teenage daughters and a son, Ferman said.

He said Iniestra forced the boy to work and often beat him for not bringing home enough money.

Tapia told reporters that Iniestra was manipulative and told her that he belonged to the middle class and that men of that status could have several women living with them.

Ferman said Iniestra faces up to 30 years in prison. He has been charged with homicide, kidnapping and child and domestic abuse.

The gruesome story shocked Mexicans already pummelled by daily images of drug cartel violence.

“He kept them totally hidden with the windows covered with wooden planks,” Mancera said at a news conference.

“The conditions were absolutely horrible in the room where he kept the girls. They had to use the bathroom there and their brother had to clean everything up by hand,” Mancera said.

Iniestra had five children with the girls and forced their younger brother to work collecting cardboard and selling sweets outside the school, beating him with a belt or tying him up naked if he did not bring back enough money.

Although the city’s attorney general’s office said Tapia was so terrorised that she turned over her entire savings to Iniestra, she eventually lodged a complaint with police that led to the children’s rescue.

The youngest surviving child, the 3-month-old baby, was taken to the hospital with blunt head trauma from Iniestra’s beatings. The other victims were sent to protective custody.

Mancera said Tapia and her daughters were suffering from Stockholm syndrome, when captives identify with their kidnappers, because they defended Iniestra’s behaviour when questioned by prosecutors.