For a brief period each morning Vasek, who is about five, is let out to be fed and washed. But once his cage has been cleaned he is forced back inside.

Vasek shakes the iron frame with all the force he can muster and tears at the wire mesh that confines him. His screams of anger ring through the building. In an adjacent cage his friend Michal puts his hands over his ears to shut out the noise and bursts into tears.

There is nothing in the children’s cages to comfort or console them — no teddy bears or toys and certainly no gifts from home. Vasek’s parents live less than a mile away, but according to staff they have not visited once since they brought him in as a baby with beautiful blond curls. He has a sister who does not even know he exists, they say.

Nor do the nurses show Vasek any warmth: they refer to him by his surname and cannot say whether he is four, five or six. The human contact in his daily routine consists mainly of a quick wash, nappy changes and perhaps a head shave.

The only distraction for Vasek as he stood forlornly in his cage last week in a room of bare whitewashed walls and fluorescent lights was the sight of a man in his late seventies lying on a bed opposite, shaking, sedated and apparently close to death.

Vasek and Michal are among five mentally handicapped children discovered in cages by an undercover Sunday Times reporter who posed as a prospective social worker and carried a concealed camera during three visits to Raby, a two-hour drive from the sophisticated city of Prague.

Many others — from babies, toddlers and teenagers to frail elderly people — exist in cages across the Czech Republic, which is regarded as one of the most progressive countries among the 10 that joined the European Union last month.

In another home visited by an undercover reporter at Slatinay in east Bohemia, a 14-year-old girl died two years ago when a bar at the top of her cage fell on her head and fractured her skull. Instead of scrapping the cages, the director bought more modern ones. Small children were inside them last week.

They are also used in neighbouring Slovakia and in Hungary, where a recent medical report on a man with spina bifida concluded that he would have learnt to walk had he been given therapy, but was unable to do so now because he had grown up in small cages.

The disclosures prompted condemnation this weekend from medical and legal experts and a demand from a senior British member of the European parliament for urgent reforms.

“I am gravely troubled by this medieval cruelty and I intend to champion the rights of these torture victims at the highest levels in Europe and in Britain,” said Baroness Nicholson, who has campaigned successfully to improve conditions for children in Romania. “Now that this has been brought to the world’s attention, it has to be stopped immediately.”

It was a measure of the Raby home’s sensitivity to outside opinion that Michael Balassko, its head of therapy for the past 18 years, warned the undercover reporter that she must not tell anyone what happens there.

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