AUSTRIAN POLICE have remanded in custody a man who has confessed to holding his daughter captive in his cellar for 24 years, fathering seven children with her.
Josef Fritzl (73) has admitted repeated sexual assault and to throwing a dead baby into the cellar furnace of his apartment in the western Austrian town of Amstetten.
The case has shocked Austria and awakened unhappy memories of the Natascha Kampusch case. She was kidnapped as a 10- year-old and held prisoner for eight years in a Vienna suburb before escaping in 2006.
This case only came to light on Saturday when Fritzl brought his daughter Elisabeth, registered as missing since 1984, to see her sick daughter in hospital. When suspicious doctors contacted the police, Elisabeth said that she had not run away to join a cult, as her father had claimed, but that he had held her in windowless cell with three children.
Police raided the cellar and found a reinforced concrete door in a wall, sealed with an electronic lock. After Fritzl revealed the lock combination, they entered a small room sound-proofed with rubber sheeting, followed by a narrow passage followed by cramped living quarters with 60 metres and ceilings just 1.70m high.
This is where Elisabeth Fritzl lived since August 1984, giving birth to seven children after repeated sexual assaults by her father. He removed three babies in the 1990s and raised them with his wife in their apartment three storeys above.
Meanwhile Austrian newspapers puzzled over the second horrific case of its kind in two years. "The neighbours always describe the perpetrator as nice and friendly - they have to, otherwise they would have a lot of explaining to do," said Die Pressenewspaper, "but this case is a sobering reminder of the grim void behind the facade of niceness and neighbourliness. Scratching too hard at that facade just isn't allowed."
The Österreichtabloid was more blunt: "The community of Amstetten should drown in shame . . . The neighbours are turning a blind eye."