Image copyright EPA Image caption Police described the location where the children were found as a "makeshift compound" near the community of Amalia in the north of New Mexico

Police in the US state of New Mexico have rescued 11 malnourished children who were being kept in squalid conditions in a remote desert compound. On Friday, 11 children between the ages of one and 15 years old were found living in extreme poverty on a remote compound outside Amalia, New Mexico, after the Taos County Sheriff’s Department was forwarded a note, believed to have written by someone inside, pleading, “We are starving and need food and water.”

“I absolutely knew that we couldn’t wait on another agency to step up, and we had to go check this out as soon as possible,” Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said in a statement posted to the department’s Facebook page on Saturday. Taos County Sheriff’s officials said Saturday the children ranging in age from 1 to 15 were removed from the compound in the small community of Amalia — 145 miles northeast of Albuquerque and in an isolated high-desert area near the New Mexico-Colorado border. One of the men, 39-year-old Siraj Wahhaj, was jailed on a Georgia warrant alleging child abduction while the other man, identified only as Lucas Morten, was arrested on suspicion of harboring a fugitive, Hogrefe said. “We all gave the kids our water and what snacks we had — it was the saddest living conditions and poverty I have seen.”

While the note gave local police probable cause to investigate, authorities from Clayton County, Georgia, and the FBI had been monitoring the compound for two months as part of an ongoing search for a missing three-year-old boy allegedly abducted by his father late last year. Image copyright Taos County Sheriff's Office Image caption From left to right: Jany Leveille, Hujhrah Wahhaj, Subhannah Wahhaj

No fresh water was found at the site, and the only food there was a few potatoes and a box of rice, police said. Hogrefe said the adults and children were without shoes and wore basically dirty rags for clothing and “looked like Third World country refugees.”

The group appeared to be living at the compound for a few months, but the sheriff said it remains unclear how or why they ended up in New Mexico.
Police in New Mexico rescue 11 malnourished children being kept in squalid conditions in a remote desert compound.