The 22-year-old, known only as Zunduri, managed to escape her captors and is recovering from her ordeal in hospital in Mexico City.

She was forced to work in a dry cleaning business, ironing clothes for 12 hours a day, and was allowed only one meal a day.

Doctors say Zunduri, who has anaemia, was tortured so badly she was left with a body more like that of an old-age pensioner. 

If she stopped work for a rest she was beaten with a wrench, a tie and other instruments causing her multiple wounds. Her back was also burned with an iron. 

Zunduri's neck is horrifically scarred, her back and arms are covered in wounds and she has cuts and bruises elsewhere all across her emaciated frame.

She sometimes got so hungry she would eat the polythene packaging on the garments she had pressed to fill the void in her stomach, she told police.

Zunduri finally managed to escape when her brutal captors failed to chain her up properly and she fled the dry cleaners.

She said: 'I was tortured. There is no part on my body without scars.

'I want them to pay for every tear, every pain, every blow for everything I have had to suffer.

'My life plan is to live. I want to be a pastry chef, I want to live, I want to recover all the years I have lost. 

'I don't want the world to know my name, just call me Zunduri, it's Japanese. A friend of mine is named like that. It means beautiful girl.' 

Police said that when Zunduri had first started working for the family they gave her a room and paid her but when she was accused of stealing things in the house, they stopped paying, chained her up and beat her constantly. 

Shocked detectives arrested five people on suspicion of holding Zunduri against her will.

Jose de Jesus Sanchez Vera, Leticia Molina Ochoa, her sister Fani Molina Ochoa, Ivette Hernandez Molina and her sister Jannet Hernandez Molina have all been detained. 

The owners of the business could face up to 40 years in prison.

Slavery is thought to be rife in Mexico. The Global Slavery Index indicates that there are 266,900 people working as if they were owned by a master in the country.

This is a greater number than those in forced slave labour estimated in the whole of Afghanistan, North Korea and Serbia combined, according to the index.  

(dailymail.co.uk)