Rat eating
Rats attacked a 14-year-old paraplegic girl in northern France. Christian Hartmann/Reuters

A 14 year-old paraplegic teenage girl was mutilated by a pack of rats as she slept in her medical bed in northern France.

The defenceless girl was left "drenched in blood" after being attacked by the rodents who bit and scratched her hundreds of times in the city of Roubaix.

The girl is currently critically ill after the pack of rats swarmed into her bedroom as she was sleeping on the ground floor of a rented house.

Reports from France suggest that the girl had 45 facial lesions -150 on her hands and 30 on her feet - while several of her finger tips were gnawed off.

The father-of-three said to the local newspaper Courrier-Picard that his daughter was found "drenched in blood" on Saturday (2 September).

The man, who has two other children, said that he thought that she might have been the victim of violent burglars.

"There was blood coming from her ears - I was terrified that she might have had a brain haemorrhage," he said.

Speaking to La Voix du Nord the father said: "When at 7pm on Saturday we went to see her, Samantha was lying in a pool of blood."

The father of three thought his daughter had been the victim of a violent break-in. "She was bleeding from her ears, I thought she'd had a brain haemorrhage. I had the fright of my life," he said.

"She must have felt the rats on her but didn't have the presence of mind to call us," he said. "She's received a battery of vaccines. Her fingertips have been gnawed off. It's not operable".

Now the girl's father has filed a complaint against his landlord and against the city, saying that he had asked for a pile of rubbish bins left nearby to be cleaned, the police source said.

The girl's life is not now in danger and a preliminary investigation has been opened to examine "housing conditions contrary to human dignity", the prosecutor's office told Agence France Presse (AFP).