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Daniel Pelka's mother and stepfather jailed for life

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Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek to serve minimum of 30 years for starving, torturing and killing four-year-old son

The mother and stepfather of Daniel Pelka have been jailed for life for starving, torturing and battering the four-year-old to death.

Magdelena Luczak, 27, and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, 34, were told they would serve at least 30 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.

Luczak and Krezolek systematically denied the boy meals and force-fed him salt to make him vomit when he was caught sneaking extra food. He was so hungry that he stole sandwiches from other children at school and dug through bins for discarded apple cores.

One child protection expert who examined the boy's body said she had seen such emaciation only in pictures of concentration camp victims. A radiologist compared Daniel's frame to that of a seriously ill cancer patient, and a police detective said he looked like child from a famine-ridden part of Africa.

The couple kept him locked for long periods in a tiny, unheated box room, which he had to use as a toilet, at the family home in Coventry. They ordered him to adopt stress positions used by torturers and to go on endurance runs around the house.

When the pair believed he had misbehaved they threw him into cold baths and his mother once boasted that she had almost drowned him, while his sibling, who cannot be identified, reported that he had once seen the boy's head being held under water.

Daniel died in March last year after being hit around the head by one or both adults. His body was laid out on a bed next to his terrified sibling and Luczak and Krezolek waited more than 30 hours before calling 999.

During the pair's nine-week trial at Birmingham crown court, it emerged that professionals – including health workers and police – had had numerous contacts with the family. Teachers at his school, Little Health primary, had seen him scavenging for food and noticed injuries to his face but no effective action was taken to protect him.

A serious case review is being carried out by the Coventry safeguarding children board. The review has already scrutinised the actions of all the agencies involved with Daniel and the plan is to publish the findings within six weeks once new information that arose during the trial has been taken into account.

On Thursday the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, branded the treatment meted out to the boy as evil and vile. Speaking during his weekly phone-in on the London radio station LBC, Clegg said: "Clearly people must have seen something was wrong with this boy. We all ask the same questions: How did this happen? What happened when teachers saw this boy scavenging in bins, when they saw him lose all that weight? They apparently did pass information on – why did no one act on it?

"So many teachers and people in the NHS and social work that I know have only the best interests of children at heart. It's not a lack of motive. But I think what people worry about is that maybe one bit of the system doesn't talk to another bit of the system."

Jurors, who had sat through a wealth of evidence charting six months of systematic abuse of the defenceless youngster, took less than four hours to unanimously convict Luczak and former soldier Krezolek, both Polish nationals, on Wednesday. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.

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