The German authorities are demanding Dutch ‘forest boy’ Robin van Helsum repay them the €20,000 it has cost to keep him since he emerged from woods near Berlin, the AD reports.

Van Helsum has spent the past nine months being looked after by the German state, which has paid for his board and lodging, German lessons, clothes and €250 a month spending money.
‘It is very frustrating that someone has wrongly profited from our youth social work provisions for nine months,’ one official told the paper. ‘He has not even apologised or said thank you.’
Van Helsum made headlines around the world when he arrived in the German capital on September 5 last year. Claiming to be 17-years-old, he told authorities he had been living in the forest with his father since the death of his mother in a car accident five years previously. When his father died, the boy said he buried him in the forest and then walked to Berlin.
He was unmasked as a 20-year-old Dutchman from Hengelo last week after being recognised in new photographs.

Berlin forest boy is Dutch