Ashya King was reunited with his parents at his hospital bedside in Spain today after his father said that doctors in England were going to “kill him” or “turn him into a vegetable”.
The tearful reunion came as a clinic in the Czech Republic accepted Ashya for high-tech cancer therapy, which his family hope will reduce the risks of brain damage to the five-year-old. However, the boy’s fate remains to be decided by the High Court.
A protective order has been granted to ensure his safety after his parents took him from a British hospital without doctors’ consent last week.
Ashya has been separated from his parents for four nights, caused by Britain’s attempts to extradite Mr and Mrs King for alleged child cruelty.
They were released yesterday after British prosecutors withdrew a European arrest warrant.
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“They were able to see him without any problem. It was very emotional,” an official at the children’s hospital in Malaga said today. The hospital said that the parents “can stay with him the whole time but they will not be able to take him out of the hospital until the custody issue is resolved”.
Brett King, Ashya’s father, today said that he had taken the boy from Southampton general hospital to stop him being turned into “a vegetable”.
Mr King and his wife, Naghemeh, had been handcuffed and treated like terrorists, he said, but he insisted he would do the same again.
“My son’s worth everything, worth me going to prison, worth everything, because they were going to kill him in England or turn him into a vegetable,” Mr King said.
“I would be happy to spend years in prison rather than my son being given treatment that’s going to kill him or disable him for the rest of his life. Would I do it all again? Yes I would.”
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He criticised Southampton general hospital, where doctors had wanted to perform radiotherapy on Ashya’s brain tumour. Mr King had requested proton beam therapy, which is considered more precise, and offered to pay for it. “The hospital knew that we were going to get proton therapy, I told them,” he said.
“I told the doctor ‘I’m paying for it myself but I haven’t got the money, I need to sell my house’. I said to them ‘I’m going. The NHS is not going to pay, I’ve got to sort this out for my son.’
“I couldn’t actually tell them the day, because they had threatened me previously. When I just asked ‘What is cancer? How did my son get it? Is there any alternatives?’, straight away they said if I ask any more questions the right for me to make a decision would be taken away from me.
“So from that moment I had so much fear to mention anything to them because they could have stopped my son getting any treatment and just forcing this very strong treatment on him.”
The proton therapy centre in Prague has accepted that Ashya is suitable for treatment, after studying his medical records, but said that the boy would need chemotherapy first.
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Mr King described the couple’s time locked in a cell in Madrid. “The doctor said my heart was beating too fast when they examined me. I said I couldn’t relax. It’s hurting my heart to think my son is by himself without his parents,” he said. “I could hear my wife crying in her cell. I couldn’t console her. Our hearts were hurting to see him.”
Mrs King said she was very tired: “All I was doing all the time was crying and crying. What could I do in a prison cell? I was with Ashya in hospital in Southampton 24 hours a day, changing his nappies, doing everything.
“As soon as we left the hospital and were later arrested I couldn’t do all that.��
David Cameron told the House of Commons: “To be fair to the authorities involved in the case of Ashya King, they all want to do the best for the child. That is what they are thinking of, but I think what happened was that decisions were taken that weren’t correct and didn’t chime with a sense of common sense.”