Inside Doomsday cult where dad-of-9 caged kids in dog kennel ahead of apocalypse

A warped father caged and abused his children for more than a decade and kept one of them in a kennel because he thought the world was going to end, a court has heard.

The dad-of-nine subjected his kids to regular beatings, denied them food - believing it would help "stop evil spirits" because they were "unclean".

Gerrit Jan Van Dorsten, 67, was finally arrested in October 2019 after his boy walked into a bar in a rural village in the Netherlands where staff raised the alarm.

Dutch police stormed the house of horrors and rescued the remaining children.

Van Dorsten was arrested and charged with doling out "very serious physical punishment".

His son Jan told the bar staff that he and his family had not left the home for nine years, and had been patiently waiting for the apocalypse.

It then emerged van Dorsten held his captives, aged 18 and 25 at the time of his arrest, in makeshift cells in a hidden dungeon.

Court hearings detailed the horror abuse van Dorsten inflicted on the children including one boy punished by having his hands and feet tied.

Another spent the summer captive in a dog house after being forced to live in a caravan away from the rest of the family, prosecutors claimed.

A 61-year-old Austrian handyman, who was described as a 'disciple' of van Dorsten, was jailed this week for helping isolate the kids.

Named only as Joseph B due to Dutch privacy rules, he bought the family groceries and the court was told without his contribution, isolating the children from society for so long would not have been possible.

The court in the city of Assen, however, acquitted Joseph B. of detaining three older children and abusing any of van Dorsten's children.

After suffering a stroke van Dorsten himself was deemed too ill for trial.

However, the sick dad was charged with depriving the kids of their liberty from 2007 to 2019, as well as alleged sexual abuse of two of his older three children.

Prosecutors said the youngest six of the nine children "lived in seclusion from birth, were kept indoors and had to be quiet so that no one would notice that they existed."

Having never attended school, the children were not registered with Dutch authorities and had been isolated for so long they had lost the ability to talk properly and spoke a bizarre "fantasy language" to shocked cops, the lawyers said.