She pulled back the lid of the brown cardboard box, and invited the jurors to take a sniff at the objects inside. It was, said Christiane Burkheiser, a chance for the jury to experience for themselves the rancid stink that pervaded every inch of the underground prison beneath the family home in Amstetten, west of Vienna, where Josef Fritzl held his daughter for 24 years and allegedly raped her repeatedly.
It was one of the more dramatic moments of the opening on Monday of the long-awaited trial of the Austrian electrical engineer. No one in the public gallery could see what was in the box — children’s toys, books, clothing perhaps — but the crumpled looks on the jurors’ faces left little to the imagination.
The state prosecutor had felt the full impact of the cellar prison when she visited it herself.
“I’ve seen the cellar dungeon twice,” Burkheiser said. “It has a morbid atmosphere, which starts with having to crawl in on your hands and knees through the 83cm entranceway. And it’s sinister. It’s really bad. It’s incredibly damp, a damp that creeps into you after just a few minutes,” she said.
Fritzl sat listening impassively on a suede-upholstered chair, wearing grey trousers and a black-and-white check jacket that was slightly too large for him.
Minutes earlier he had shuffled into the St Polten district court, flanked by six police officers and clutching tightly at a royal blue folder to shield his face from the clicking cameras.
The 73-year-old looked a shadow of his former self as he walked across the creaking oak floor. Gone were his healthy suntan and the confident gait shown in video footage of him on holiday or in snapshots enjoying barbecues in the garden — while his daughter, and the offspring he fathered during years of sexual abuse, languished beneath his feet.
Fritzl refused to answer the questions fired at him by two Austrian reporters.
“If you had your chance again, would you do it all the same way?” one reporter asked, provoking nervous laughter from the public gallery.
Fritzl kept his shield in place, although at times he was seen to apparently grin as his grey moustache twitched behind the folder. When he sat after cameras had been ordered from the court, he placed the file on the table in front of him and held his hands to the side of his head like blinkers.
As Burkheiser, for 25 minutes, laid out her emotional arguments in the small courtroom, sometimes using a laser pointer to indicate masking tape she had stuck to the walls of the wood-paneled courtroom to illustrate the narrowness of entrances, the low heights of ceilings that Elisabeth and her children had had to endure.
The space constraints and the damp were, she said, minor compared with the other hardships and sufferings. For years Elisabeth had had no sink, no warm water, no daylight. She had “got her air from the cracks in the walls.” Sometimes she went without light for days at a time — “no lamp, not even a torch or candles.” And there were also the repeated rapes.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS