Three girls and a boy were 'fed' excrement-smeared food through a hole
Father urinated in the children's mouths and beat them with an iron bar
Two girls locked in suitcase smeared with dog excrement and swung around
Hardenne and Simon jailed for ten years for 'inflicting inhuman treatment'
A barbaric couple who 'water-boarded' their four children during a decade of captivity and extreme abuse have been jailed for ten years in Belgium.
Parents Sebastien Hardenne and Isabelle Simon kept their three girls and a boy in a locked room at night and 'fed' them excrement-smeared food through a hole in the wall.
The father urinated in the children's mouths, beat them with an iron bar and whips and tortured them with an electric fly swatter.
Barbaric: A couple who 'water-boarded' their four children during ten years of captivity and extreme abuse have been jailed for ten years in Belgium. The children are now being looked after in Namur, pictured
Sadistic Hardenne also performed 'water-boarding' torture similar to that allegedly used at America's Guantanamo Bay prison, the court in Marche-en-Famenne was told.
Social services in the town of Biron were alerted by the children's school in 2003 that they were dirty and undernourished, but they were only taken into care once in a decade for two months before being returned to their parents.
The parents were finally arrested earlier this year after an anonymous tip-off to the authorities.
Hardenne and Simon, in their 40s, were both jailed for ten years yesterday for 'inflicting inhuman treatment'.
The couple's lawyer Jacqueline Petit told the court they 'felt sorry' for what they had done and handed the court a letter of apology from the parents to their children.
The youngsters - now aged 11 to around 16 - are being cared for permanently by social services in the town of Namur.
Neighbour Anne-Marie Durieux told Belgian media she saw the couple as worse than notorious Belgian child killer Marc Dutroux.
She added: 'They are worse than him because they did it to their own children.
'Hardenne once told me he had spoiled his children by giving them chips to eat. I later learnt he had made them throw them up.
'They had two terrace houses side-by-side and had a hole cut in the wall to pass through food to the children in a locked room. Now I know the food was soiled with urine and excrement.
'It makes me feel physically ill to realise now the extent of what the children were suffering and that I didn't spot it.'
An uncle of the children who is their mother's brother-in-law was also jailed for six years for his role in the abuse.
Only 10 years???