BOY 8 forced to kneel in grains, caused seeds to take root in his knees

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT 

A mother and stepfather of an eight-year-old boy who had to have buckwheat surgically removed from his knees after they forced him to kneel on a pile of grain seeds have been jailed.

Sergey Kazakov, 35, punished the boy for ‘running away from home and stealing money’ by making him kneel, sometimes naked, for up to nine hours at a time on the grain, causing seeds to take root in his bloodied knees.

The crop had to be surgically removed under general anaesthetic at a hospital in Omsk, Russia.

The boy’s mother Alina Yumasheva, 27, admitted she had approved the punishment which was inflicted on ten consecutive days in May 2019 and other times.

Kazakov also kicked the boy and pulled his hair while he was kneeling.

Yumasheva was sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison while mastermind Kazakov was jailed for four-and-a-half-years.

The pair were fined a total of £4,825 which must be paid to the boy.

The eight-year-old had been living with his mother until her trial and now has been sent to an orphanage.

Nurse Lyudmila Sharapova told the court: ‘It is the first time in my 43 years work that I have seen such injuries.

‘The wounds were infected, the buckwheat had been embedded into his skin for several days.

‘It was horrific. The mother should beg her son to forgive her until the end of her life.

‘When I was cleaning up his wounds, he asked me: “Auntie, will you put me into a normal family now?”

A neighbour who saw the wounds said: ‘There was no skin on his knees, just raw meat.’

The couple also starved the boy for up to four days at a time, claim state investigators.

The boy’s ordeal came to light when he fled the family home and pleaded with a female neighbour to get him ‘a normal family’.

The neighbour called in doctors because of the horrific wounds on the child’s bleeding knees.