LONDON — The wrenching tale of a British boy with a brain tumor and his parents, who were arrested after fleeing the country with him to seek treatment abroad, entered a new phase on Monday as the parents attended an extradition hearing in Madrid and refused to return to Britain.
At the hearing, the judge ordered Brett King, 51, and his wife, Naghemeh, 45, back into custody for a maximum of 72 hours pending further examination of their case, as well as medical feedback from the hospital in Málaga, Spain, where their 5-year-old son, Ashya, is being treated, according to reports in the Spanish news media, citing unnamed judicial sources.
After being told that Ashya would not benefit from proton beam radiation therapy — a cancer treatment not available to brain tumor patients in Britain but sometimes paid for by the National Health Service abroad — the Kings took their son out of the hospital against doctors’ orders on Thursday. They left Britain later that day, taking Ashya and his six siblings along.
A European arrest warrant was then issued by the British police, amid claims that Ashya’s life was in danger if he did not receive specialist medical attention. The family was arrested near Málaga on Saturday. Before the arrest, Mr. King posted a video of himself and Ashya on YouTube, denouncing the police hunt as “ridiculous.”
He said the family believed that proton beam treatment, despite what British doctors had told him, was the best available treatment for his son’s condition, a cancer known as medulloblastoma. They went to Spain, Mr. King said, to sell a house they owned there and to raise money for the treatment in the Czech Republic.
Mr. King said that the treatment his son had received in Southampton had seemed to him like “trial and error,” and that proton beam treatment, which targets brain tumors more directly than general radiation therapy, was recommended for this type of cancer on American, French and Swiss medical websites.
Reacting to the video, University Hospital Southampton said it had offered the family a second opinion and, if warranted, help with organizing treatment abroad. A spokeswoman for the National Health Service said, “Where doctors recommend it, the N.H.S. does fund proton beam therapy, including supporting 99 children last year to travel abroad for treatment.”
The proton therapy is available in only one hospital in Britain, the Clatterbridge Cancer Center in Wirral, and only for patients with rare eye cancers. But its use is reportedly being expanded to hospitals in Manchester and London.
After their parents’ arrest, Ashya’s siblings were not allowed to visit their brother in his hospital room in Málaga, which is reportedly under police guard. But his oldest brother, Danny, 23, told the BBC on Monday that he would get access later in the day.
The hearing on Monday in Madrid was held behind closed doors. The parents have not been charged with any crime under Spanish law. If the British authorities proceed with a formal extradition request, a decision will be made by a different panel of Spanish judges, but most likely not for several weeks.
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