[bbfan1991]

Yorkshire housewife has claimed that she was raised by monkeys as a child.

Marina Chapman has revealed that she spent five years of her childhood living with a colony of capuchin monkeys in Colombia.

Chapman, who now lives in Bradford, says she learnt to catch rabbits and birds with her bare hands after being abandoned by kidnappers in the heart of the jungle, Western Australia's The Sunday Times reports.

Chapman was found living with the monkeys by a group of hunters who exploited her by selling her to a brothel in the city of Cúcuta.

The young girl escaped the brothel and spent many years living on the streets, before being taken in by a Colombian family to work as their maid when she was a teenager.

In her mid-twenties she visited Bradford with a neighbouring family who were travelling there on business.

She decided to stay after she met John Chapman, then a 29-year-old bacteriologist, at a church meeting. They married in 1977.

Mrs Chapman and her family are now keen to tell her harrowing story to highlight the horrific nature of human trafficking in South America.

Vanessa James, one of Chapman's two daughters, has said: "I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sister. We didn't think it odd - it was just mum telling her life. So in a way it was nothing special having a mother like that."