An eight-year-old girl has been freed after allegedly being locked away by her mother and grandparents in western Germany since she was less than a year old, leaving her so physically underdeveloped as to be barely able to climb a flight of stairs. The girl, named only as “Maria” in German media, is understood to have spent most of the last seven and a half years in a locked room at her grandparents’ house in Attendorn, a town of about 25,000 residents east of Cologne. “She can’t have managed to get much of a glimpse of the outside world,” the prosecutor Patrick Baron von Grotthuss told local newspaper SauerlandKurier. Doctors who examined the girl after she was freed on 23 September found no signs of physical mistreatment or malnourishment, municipal authorities said in a statement. However, during the examination she reportedly said she had never seen a forest, been in a meadow or been driven in a car. While the girl was able to talk and walk, Grotthuss said she was “barely able to climb stairs on her own or navigate uneven ground”. Why the girl was hidden from the public for nearly her whole life remains unclear, as her mother and grandparents have reportedly declined to give answers during police questioning. The girl’s father, who was already separated from the mother at the time of her birth, told SauerlandKurier he had found a note on his car’s windscreen when the girl was about six months old, notifying him of his ex-partner’s intention to move to Italy with the child. The mother, named only as “Rosemarie G” by the tabloid Bild to protect her privacy while criminal proceedings are ongoing, informed local authorities she had moved to Calabria, south-west Italy, in mid-2015. When the child’s father reported to youth welfare authorities in September 2015 that he had repeatedly seen the mother and child in Attendorn, they questioned the girl’s maternal grandparents, but were informed that the pair were residing in Italy. It was only in July this year that local authorities again investigated the whereabouts of the child, after a married couple living in the adjacent municipality of Lennestadt tipped off police about a rumour that the now eight-year-old had been locked away at her grandparents’ house for years. Relatives of the mother told investigators that the pair had never lived in Italy and were contactable via a German landline, a claim that was confirmed when Italian police told the Olpe district youth welfare office on 12 September that the mother and the child had never resided at the Calabrian address they had put down as their new home. Eleven days later, following a court order, police and youth welfare officers found the girl at her grandparents’ home. The public prosecutor’s office in the city of Siegen is investigating the child’s mother and grandparents over false imprisonment and mistreatment of a minor. The mother, who is reported to be 47, could face up to 10 years in prison.