An elderly Austrian, portrayed by media as a “monster,” yesterday started to tell how he imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years, police said, as the country expressed horror at the seven children she bore as his captive.
Josef Fritzl, 73, “has admitted building the dungeon and to holding his daughter and three children there. But he has not admitted incest,” prosecution spokesman Gerhard Sedlacek told reporters.
Fritzl, who had previously not spoken since his arrest on Saturday, was scheduled to be brought before an investigating magistrate late last night, he said.
PHOTO: AP
Fourteen police meanwhile scoured the three cramped underground rooms in the family house in Amstetten, eastern Austria, where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were allegedly held prisoner.
She has alleged she was drugged by her father in August 1984 and had been his prisoner ever since. She is said to have given birth to seven children in the “dungeon,” one of whom died.
The six surviving children are three boys and three girls aged between five and 20.
The rooms, measuring 50m² to 60m² in all” and with a ceiling just 1.70m high, were “furnished like a flat,” Sedlacek said.
Lower Austria police chief Franz Polzer said that there was “a wide range of questions that still need answering” such as how Fritzl supplied the woman and children with food, how the babies were born and cared for in such cramped conditions, and how he could have incarcerated his victims for so long without his wife knowing.
The case is the latest in a series of horror abuse cases to have stunned Austrians and newspapers asked how authorities could again have failed to detect the woman.
The case came to light when one of the children, now 19, was admitted to hospital in critical condition.
Doctors looking for background information stepped up efforts to find the mother. The whole horrific story came to light when Fritzl allowed them to establish contact with his daughter.
The Oesterreich tabloid featured a six-page special report on what it termed as “the worst crime of all time.”
“Amstetten is in a state of shock,” mayor Herbert Katzengruber wrote on the town’s Web site. “Our thoughts and feelings are with the victims.”
DNA tests are being carried out to establish if Fritzl is the father of the six surviving children. The seventh child, a twin, is believed to have died shortly after birth and the body subsequently burned, police said.
The Kronen-Zeitung tabloid portrayed Fritzl as a keen fisherman, popular among neighbors and locals, but a “monster, a brutal tyrant” in the cellar of his own home.
He legally adopted two of the boys and one girl, allegedly telling his wife, Rosemarie, and local authorities that three babies had been left by Elisabeth on their doorstep, in different years.
Each delivery had been accompanied by a letter purportedly signed by Elisabeth Fritzl saying she could not support the child because she already had others to care for.
The trio went to school as normal, seemingly unaware that their mother and three other siblings, a girl of 19, and boys aged 18 and five, were trapped underground.
Neither neighbors nor social services appear to have had any inkling, either.
“They had a swimming pool in the garden, we would hear them laughing, the three of them,” one neighbor said.
Another backed up the story of the babies on the doorstep, adding: “[Rosemarie] always looked after the kids so well, taking them to school. We said ‘it’s incredible what she manages to do at her age.’”
Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, told investigators her mother knew nothing about the sexual abuse she had endured since the age of 11, some seven years before she was locked away.
Austria’s most notable prior case was that of Natascha Kampusch, locked up by a man in the basement of a house for eight years before she escaped.
Three young girls were also locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near Linz.
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