Woman hooked to online game neglects kids

LONDON: A British woman, who was hooked to an online game, neglected her three children and allowed her two dogs to starve to death. The kids had no hot food to eat and when the dogs died, their bodies were left rotting in the dining room.

The 33-year-old widow became addicted to the online game called Small World.

The Sun Monday reported that a judge has banned the woman from going on the Internet again. She was also directed to do 75 hours unpaid work and banned from keeping animals.

The woman slept only two hours a night when she got hooked to the game in which dwarfs and giants battle to conquer the world and she played almost non-stop for six months, a court was told.

The children - who were aged nine, 10 and 13 - didn't have hot food to eat and instead "drank" cold baked beans from tins because there were no spoons.

After the woman's two dogs died, their bodies were left rotting for two months in the dining room.

A neighbour who saw through the letterbox at the "appalling conditions" in the house at Swanley, Kent raised the alarm.

Police officials who visited the house retched at the stench from the "decay and filth". Rubbish and mouldy food lay on the floor and flies swarmed the dogs' bodies.

Prosecutor Deepak Kapur stated that the woman began playing Small World for an hour a day, but it soon turned into "an obsession where she only got two hours sleep a night".

"She let everything go. She bought food that didn't need cooking. She fed the children pot noodles, sandwiches, chips and pies. She was ashamed," Kapur was quoted as saying.