AMSTETTEN, Austria — Austrian police have arrested a 73-year-old man who they say kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, three of whom never emerged into daylight from their prison until now.
The lurid nature of the alleged crime, first reported on Sunday, so horrified the Austrian press that the local media on Monday dropped usual procedures of withholding the full names of defendants in criminal cases. They identified the man as Josef Fritzl, an electrical engineer. The name matched the nameplate on the door of the defendant’s home in this quiet Austrian town.
Mr. Fritzl, who was arrested on Sunday, had initially kept silent but has now said he is prepared to confess to the crimes and give an account of his actions over the past 24 years, Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference shown on the Austrian broadcaster ORF.
He “has now said that he locked up his daughter for 24 years and that he alone fathered her seven children and that he locked them up in the cellar," Mr. Polzer said, Reuters reported.
At the news conference, Austrian authorities said they were distributing photographs of Mr. Fritzl because they wanted information from the public. In particular, they wanted to know how it was possible for him to bring food and children’s clothing to the house for so many years to provide for the children in his basement.
Mr. Fritzl’s daughter, identified by the police as Elisabeth, was released by her father last week after her eldest daughter, 19, became ill and was taken to a hospital. She had for several years suffered from severe attacks of convulsions. After she had been taken to hospital, her mother spoke to doctors and Mr. Fritzl was picked up by police over the weekend. The authorities said the daughter still in serious condition.
In its macabre details, the case carries echoes of the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian schoolgirl who was held in a windowless basement cell for eight years before escaping in August 2006.
This latest case, which unfolded in a nondescript, three-story apartment house in Amstetten, a town 80 miles west of Vienna, is, if possible, even harder to comprehend.
Elisabeth, 42, told the police that in 1984, her father drugged, handcuffed and dragged her into a basement, accessible only through a hidden door with an electronic code. She said she spent close to the next quarter-century imprisoned there, a constant victim of sexual abuse and incest by her father.
“This is not a mother abandoning her child, which then had to be admitted to the hospital,” Mr. Polzer, chief of the criminal investigations unit, said at a news conference on Sunday, according to Reuters.
“We know that she herself has been kept imprisoned by her own father for 24 years in the basement,” he said, “and furthermore, she obviously was also subjected to sexual abuse.”
Elisabeth gave birth to seven children during that time, one of whom died shortly after birth, the police said. Her father ordered her to give up three of the children, who were then adopted or cared for as foster children by Josef and his wife, Rosemarie, the mother of Elisabeth.
The police said Rosemarie apparently did not know of her daughter’s ordeal, believing that she had left the children on her parents’ doorstep because she was unable to care for them herself. When Elisabeth disappeared in 1984, her father claimed that she had written a letter asking her parents not to search for her.
Three of the children born in the basement — now 19, 18 and 5 — never left it, the police said.
When Josef brought Elisabeth and the others out of confinement to go to hospital, he told his wife that their “missing” daughter had returned. He is in police custody, charged with abduction and incest. Elisabeth told the police that she had been sexually abused by her father from the age of 11.
The authorities said they would perform DNA tests to determine whether Josef is the father of the children.
Also a mystery is how Josef was able to conceal his daughter and her children for so long. Behind the door, for which only Josef had the access code, he built a dwelling capable of sustaining a family.
“There is not only one, but a number of rooms: one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities,” Mr. Polzer said in interview with the Austrian broadcaster ORF.
Neighbors were flabbergasted. “It is so horrible,” Corina Schmid said to ORF. “I can see the house from my balcony and from my window, and when I think now of who was in there, I can simply not imagine that.”
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