Josef Fritzl

[Salem6]

The news that a man may have imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children has been described as one of the worst cases in Austria's criminal history.


Mr Fritzl is described as domineering and authoritarian

Josef Fritzl, aged 73, is in police custody and is still being questioned. Police say he has confessed to the alleged crimes and that his confession is supported by DNA evidence.

They do not believe anyone else was involved in his daughter's incarceration.

The picture that is beginning to emerge is of a man who led a double life. In public he appeared to be a respectable member of the community, living in Amstetten with his wife Rosemarie, with whom he had seven grown-up children.

But the results of DNA tests announced on Tuesday confirm he had a second, secret family with his daughter Elisabeth, whom police say he lured into a cellar, aged 18, in 1984 and repeatedly abused.

She is believed to have borne him seven children, three of whom he and Rosemarie adopted or fostered. Three children remained in the cellar with their mother.

Police say Mr Fritzl has also confessed to burning the body of a seventh child shortly after it died in infancy.

'Very intelligent'

Local social services told the Austrian Press Agency that there appeared to be nothing suspicious about the family and that Mr Fritzl managed to explain "very plausibly" how three of his infant grandchildren had turned up on his doorstep.

Not one member of the family was aware that down in the soundproof cellar their sister had to live with her children

Local police chief Franz Polzer


Amstetten's local governor, Hans-Heinz Lenze, told Austria's public broadcaster ORF that the children had had regular visits from social workers, who never heard any complaints or noticed anything to arouse their suspicions.

He said they were well-behaved at school and fitted in well with their classmates.

Mr Lenze said that initially the disappearance of Elisabeth had given the social services cause for concern, but that their investigations had not revealed any major discrepancies with Mr Fritzl's story that she had run away to join a sect.

Austrian police will neither confirm nor deny local media reports that Mr Fritzl had had previous run-ins with the law.

But Mr Lenze told a news conference on Tuesday that neither Mr Fritzl nor his wife had any criminal convictions at the time of the first adoption in 1994.

A qualified electrician, the police described Mr Fritzl as "a very intelligent man" who had put electric locks on the cellar rooms which could only be opened with a special code.

They say he locked the sliding reinforced concrete door from within with a secret remote control, and hid it behind shelves.

Mr Fritzl was allegedly able to supply his secret family with clothes and food without arousing suspicion by shopping outside of Amstetten.

Police say he had an excuse to travel away from home as he owned some land and could shop in other towns and deliver goods to the cellar dungeon in the evening, unnoticed.

Domineering

Neighbours and acquaintances expressed shock at the allegations and said that Mr Fritzl treated his grandchildren affectionately and appeared to be a good grandfather.

Mr Lenze told ORF that Mr Fritzl had telephoned him last week and thanked him and the social services for looking after his family during his granddaughter Kerstin's illness.

It was the doctor treating Kerstin who first raised the alarm.

Albert Reiter said that he found it strange that she had been found unconscious outside the building where her grandparents lived, and he alerted the police.

Mrs Fritzl "had no idea" what was going on, according to the police, and was devastated to hear of her husband's alleged crimes.

Police say he was careful to make sure no one went near the cellar.

They say that they were told by Elisabeth's siblings that he had always been an "authoritarian and domineering father" and was controlling towards his wife.

As yet Mr Fritzl has not given any indication of why he committed the alleged crimes and has refused to explain why only three of the children were allowed to live upstairs with him.


news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7371959.stm

[Salem6]

Police have released photos of the cellar in which they were kept. They show a concealed network of windowless chambers. The rooms were equipped for sleeping and cooking, and with sanitary facilities.





The events in the eastern Austrian town of Amstetten are front-page news across Europe. As well as disgust at the revelations surrounding the actions of Josef Fritzl, there is disbelief that he escaped the notice of the authorities - and the suggestion that he may have had outside help.



LE PARISIEN - FRANCE
Austria ran out of superlatives to describe the horror suffered by Natascha Kampusch, kidnapped and isolated in a dungeon by her captor for eight long years. Overwhelmed, Austrians will not find words strong enough to convey the monstrous and diabolic history which has played out in secret for three decades at Amstetten.


LIBERATION - FRANCE
The Austrians are asking themselves: Why didn't social services, who visited the family several times, notice anything unusual? How could the neighbours who all know each other in this part of town not have realised anything? How was Josef able to live a double life for almost a quarter of a century? And what did his wife, who according to the investigators "didn't ask questions", really know?


DIE ZEIT - GERMANY
What does this say about a community, in which an authority figure can go about breaking this private taboo without any great difficulty for almost a quarter of a century? Is this a society which is afraid to have to look into its own abyss?


DAILY MIRROR - UK
The World's Most Evil Dad... the brute whose word was absolute law, locked the door with a code only he knew and cruelly told Elisabeth and the children that it was booby-trapped with explosives.


DAILY MAIL - UK

Neighbours said the three [children] kept above ground were well-balanced and polite members of the police sports club and voluntary fire brigade. Their grandmother, according to many, was a pillar of the community, baking cakes for fetes and becoming an active member of the parent teachers' association at their private school.


DE STANDAARD - BELGIUM
How was it possible that Josef Fritzl regularly went on holiday to Thailand for two to three weeks without his prisoners starving in the cellar? Did he handle it completely by himself or did he have help from outside?



CORRIERE DELLA SERA - ITALY
You can see the birdcage from the pavement of Dammstrasse... When he wasn't playing the good husband with old Rosemarie, or wasn't too tired from being a good grandfather to the three son/grandsons that he ended up looking after, when he wasn't telling jokes in the bar, watering his lawn, going fishing or helping his neighbours fix their broken kettles, when he wasn't disappearing for hours into the cellar to work, when in reality he was opening up the secret bolt to feed his slaves, when his double face didn't have to divide itself between the normal and the horrific, he also found time for them - those small birds, poor little things.


ABC - SPAIN
The hundreds of journalists from around the world who have flooded to the scene since yesterday have transformed the gentle pace of Amstetten. Near number 40 on Ybbsstrasse, neighbours watch the crowd, the satellite dishes and the television crews incredulously. Some are even taking photos to document the day that the name of their town was suddenly on everyone's lips. "We'd have preferred it if Amstetten had become famous for another reason," one passer-by said.



news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7373462.stm