Josef B.'s brother, who has locked up a family of six on a farm, cuts the portrait of his brother: "A greedy, lazy, unpredictable man who loves money"

World

Dutch investigators said on Wednesday that they suspected an Austrian of having forcibly withheld a father and his five children, all adults, who had lived in seclusion for several years in an isolated farm in the Netherlands.

The 58-year-old man, identified by the media as Josef B., was arrested after police discovered a family of six in a "small, closed room" of the building in Ruinerwold, a village in the northern province of Drenthe. Many questions remain about this strange case that took place in a locality where no one seems to know the occupants of the farm, nor even to have been aware of their presence there.

We now know a little more about the personality of the main suspect. A journalist from Algemeen Dagblad paid a visit to Franz, Josef's brother, in Austria. He described his brother as someone greedy, lazy, unpredictable and who loves money.

Franz lives in Austria today. It is from there that he recognized the identity of his brother as a suspect in this case. He had heard this story on television but was not sure if it was really his brother Josef. This is indeed the case, he told an Austrian newspaper. "Only when I learned more about the case and heard about the suspect's age did I know it was Josef."he explains to the KrOnen Zeitung.

Josef's brother reports that the problems in the family began when their grandfather gave him his farm. "When Josef learned that I was responsible for the farm, he immediately demanded that I pay him for his services, he always wanted more money"he explains.

Franz also explains that his brother traveled from time to time to the Netherlands, where Josef's wife and daughters frequently visited a family on a farm. Finally, Josef definitely settled in Holland and cut the bridges with his family. He did not show up at the funeral of his parents.

In a sect, he would have had a relationship with a Japanese woman. Franz thinks that his brother has seven or eight children including two daughters with whom he has had no contact.