US woman found 10 years after kidnapping

Isidro Garcia allegedly forced the young woman to marry him

A 25-year-old woman who went missing 10 years ago in California has told police she was forced to marry her captor and have his child.

The unnamed woman in Santa Ana contacted police after finding her sister on Facebook, officers said.

Isidro Garcia, 41, was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment.

Police said in a statement he had been living with the girl's family at the time of her disappearance.

The abuse began in 2004, the statement said, when Mr Garcia was dating the victim's mother and residing with her and her daughters in Santa Ana, a city in Orange County.

The police allege that Mr Garcia began sexually assaulting the victim in June of that year. Two months later he assaulted the victim's mother and drugged the teenager, driving her 26 miles north to Compton where she was locked in a garage, say police.

"Over the course of the following months and years, Mr Garcia repeatedly told the victim her family had given up looking for her, and if she tried to go back to them, the family would be deported," police said, adding he had given her false identification papers.

The two moved on several occasions to avoid police detection, the police statement says.

Mr Garcia frequently physically and sexually assaulted the victim, it is alleged, and the two of them worked together at a night cleaning service.

"Even with the opportunity to escape, after years of physical and mental abuse, the victim saw no way out of her situation and lived a life with Garcia under sustained physical and mental abuse," police said.

"In 2007, Garcia forced the victim into a marriage and in 2012 the two had a child.

"Recently the victim contacted her sister on Facebook and eventually gained the courage to contact the police."

Local media report that police were called to the house on Monday evening to answer a call regarding a domestic incident, and the woman there told them she had been kidnapped 10 years ago.

Mr Garcia, who was arrested on Tuesday, has not been formally charged.

His arrest comes a year after three women who went missing separately about a decade earlier were rescued from a house in Cleveland, Ohio.

Their captor, Ariel Castro, killed himself in prison in September 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1,000 years.