A French woman who was kidnapped by her husband for 12 years in Pakistan has been rescued.

Pakistani police have arrested a man who had been abusing his wife and children for more than a decade.

His wife, Sylvie Yasmina, a French national, said the man physically and mentally abused the family “every day” and was “very violent”, local police told BBC Urdu.

One of their sons managed to sneak out to file a police report, which raided their home in Bara, a mountainous province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Police found Yasmina and her five children in a cramped and “extremely damaged room”, with injuries all over their bodies.

Yasmina and her children were taken to a women’s shelter in Peshawar. They plan to return to France, police said.

According to Yasmina, 54, her husband “effectively imprisoned” the family after they moved to Pakistan from Australia in 2014.

“According to the woman… she was not allowed to meet anyone, their two older children were out of school, their three younger children were born in Pakistan and never went to school,” a senior police officer told BBC Urdu.

Officials have not identified Yasmina’s husband, a Pakistani national who they said was “living illegally” in Australia when the couple met.

In the year They married in 2003 and lived in Australia until 2014, when they moved to Pakistan with their two older children. Yasmina said that since then she had no contact with the outside world.

“We have been deprived of our freedom, my husband does not take care of us as a husband and a father to my children. He beats us and puts pressure on our lives every day,” Yasmina wrote in her statement to the police, some of which was published in local media.

“I felt that my future was already ruined, and the children’s future would also be ruined.”