A TEENAGE BOY missing for more than two years has been found by German police in the cupboard of a suspected paedophile. 

The 15-year-old was found hiding in a cupboard on Friday as police searched the home of a 44-year-old man in Recklinghausen suspected of distributing child pornography.

The boy, who disappeared after saying goodbye to his carers at a youth shelter early on 11 June 2017, is currently in psychiatric care.

A police spokesman said the decision on when he can go home “is up to the doctors, not the police”.

The 44-year-old suspect at whose flat the boy was found has been arrested and charged with a serious sexual offence.

Prosecutors in Bochum today said the man already had a 2018 conviction for possessing child pornography but was only given a ten-month suspended sentence.

In addition to the 44-year-old, another man was found in the apartment. He was questioned by police before being released. 

The boy was already staying with the man at that point as he is understood to have lived at the flat for “at least two years”, chief prosecutor Christian Kuhnert told DPA news agency.

What exactly happened in the first months after the child’s disappearance “is still being looked into”, he added.

TV appeal 

Police said in a statement that the officers who discovered the boy “did not see any indications at that point that he was being held against his will”.

But his mother, who was briefly reunited with her son on Friday, doubted he was there entirely out of free will.

“The man whose place they found him at must have manipulated him,” she told Bild.

I could go crazy thinking about what’s been done to him.

She said he was found wearing the same clothes as on the day he vanished, and said he looked like “a broken old man”.

“He now needs to process what’s happened over the past two and a half years. This is all so painful.”

“I want to visit him for Christmas, to celebrate a little with him,” his mother Manuela B, 53, told Germany’s best-selling tabloid Bild.

His stepfather Michael B told the RTL broadcaster he believed the boy hadn’t stayed at the flat voluntarily, adding that Marvin “didn’t talk much” when he saw his mother.

An RTL reporter standing outside the flat at the weekend saw investigators carry away boxes of dirty nappies and described an overwhelming stench of urine coming from the building. 

The boy was 13 when he was living in a care home for young people, reportedly after he had trouble processing the death of his father.

After the investigation into his disappearance had gone cold, his mother and sister made a fresh appeal for information in the TV show “Aktenzeichen XY” in July, which tries to solve missing cases.

But in the end, the boy’s discovery was entirely coincidental. 

His mother told Bild she already knows what she will give her son for Christmas.

“I want to give him new clothes.”

© – AFP 2019