FOUR German schoolgirls who went missing on Wednesday, causing a major cross-border police hunt, persuaded the 45-year-old man who took them to the Netherlands to help them run away.
This emerged yesterday with the discovery of the girls, aged 10 to 12, safe in the Dutch town of Oostburg and the arrest of the man, who was the former companion of the mother of two of them, 12-year-old twins.
The children told a Dutch social care worker that they "no longer wanted to do housework".
According to the girls, the departure was their idea and the man had been reluctant at first.
Police had feared that the girls were in danger of sexual abuse, after the mother of the twins claimed the man had already made sexual advances towards them.
But they said yesterday they had not been abused by him.
The man, who apparently had the use of a holiday chalet in the Netherlands, faces charges of kidnapping and also possession of child pornography, on the basis of magazines found in his camper van near Cologne, police said.
The Dutch police found the girls in the man's car and arrested him alter a tip from a camping site employee who recognised the car's registration number from an appeal broadcast on television.
A 10-year-old girl was kidnapped from a Berlin suburb at the end of August and taken to the Netherlands by a German couple for apparent paedophile purposes, but freed unharmed with the couple's arrest at a camping site.
There is also still shock in Germany over the assault and murder of a 17-year- old girl in Bavaria by a convicted sex offender on parole a week ago.