Austria shocked over case of decades-long incest, abuse
A father confesses to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in a secret cellar and forcing her to bear him seven children, police say.
VIENNA -- — By his own confession, Austrian police say, Josef Fritzl held his daughter inside a hidden, windowless cellar for nearly a quarter of a century, raping her repeatedly and forcing her to give birth to seven of his children.
When two of the children were freed this week, authorities said they were seeing sunlight for the first time.
Police say Fritzl, a 73-year-old electrician, confessed Monday to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth, and to incest, in a case that has horrified Austria and unleashed questions about how such a crime could take place, apparently undetected, for such a long time.
"We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime . . . an incomprehensible brutality," Interior Minister Guen- ther Platter said.
The case bears grisly resemblance to another headline-grabbing incident in which a 10-year-old Austrian girl named Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 and trapped by a sexual predator for eight years inside a tiny dungeon in a Viennese suburb before finally escaping.
If Austrians were shocked enough by Natascha's ordeal, the allegations surrounding the Fritzl family have left them positively dumbfounded. Especially disturbing, with the Fritzls, the alleged crimes were all within a family.
Elisabeth Fritzl, now 42, told authorities that her father drugged and handcuffed her in 1984 after luring her to the basement of their rambling home in Amstetten, an industrial town 75 miles west of Vienna. He later told his wife, Rosemarie, who is Elisabeth's mother, and anyone else who asked that his daughter had run away.
Instead, he kept her locked in a 50-square-meter warren of cramped underground rooms, some barely large enough to stand upright in, authorities say. The door to the prison was concealed behind shelves and secured with an electronic lock to which only Fritzl had the code.
While in captivity, Elisabeth Fritzl gave birth to the seven children, police say, based on information from her and her father. One died soon after birth, police say, and the father disposed of the body in the incinerator. Over the years, Fritzl took three of the children upstairs to the main part of the house, telling his wife that they were the missing Elisabeth's children whom she had sent back to be cared for. Rosemarie Fritzl, police say, either believed her husband's account, or did not dare to challenge it.
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