Austrian police say the man who held his daughter prisoner for 24 years and fathered seven children with her had no accomplices and planned his crime too meticulously to have been caught any earlier.
Faced with tough questions about how the shocking crimes could have gone undetected for so long, chief investigator Franz Polzer told reporters there was absolutely no indication Josef Fritzl (73) was working with anyone.
Fritzl has admitted to keeping his daughter locked in a windowless bunker, repeatedly sexually assaulting her and later imprisoning their children.
Yet despite reports he had previously been convicted of attempted rape, the authorities saw no reason to investigate him further when he applied to adopt three of those children.
The head of Amstetten social services, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said by that time, any convictions had been expunged from his record as laid down in Austrian law.
”At the time of the first adoption on May 20 1994, there were no convictions on either his record or that of his wife,” Lenze said
Police said they were probing a possible link between Fritzl and the unsolved murder of a teenager in 1986 although they admitted there was no direct connection so far.
Austrian authorities and the government have been hit by uncomfortable questions as to how a string of horrific child abuse cases could have occurred in the small Alpine republic in just a few years.
A girl in the Vienna suburbs, Natascha Kampusch, was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 at the age of 10 and kept locked up in a basement for over eight years before escaping in August 2006.
And last year it emerged that three young girls were locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near the northern city of Linz.
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer dismissed claims in the international press of an Austrian pattern, calling the Amstetten dungeon story ”an isolated case”.
Fritzl, who police say started sexually abusing his daughter, Elisabeth, when she was just 11, locked her in an underground cellar when she turned 18, telling the authorities and his family she had run away to join a religious sect.
When she became pregnant from the abuse, he began to expand the overcrowded, purpose-built dungeon from initially one room to three.
Conditions nevertheless became so cramped as each new child was born that he moved three of them to the family home upstairs, claiming that Elisabeth had deposited them on his doorstep because she was not able to look after them.
Fritzl forced Elisabeth to write letters asking the authorities to make him their legal guardian.
One child, a twin, died shortly after birth. The other three remained incarcerated with their mother in the dungeon.
No one was aware of the existence of the underground prison, not even fire inspectors who routinely checked a heating boiler in the cellar in 1999.
The door to the bunker itself, about 1m high and 60cm wide, was reinforced with concrete and had an electronic lock that could only be opened with a remote control.
The family underground had a refrigerator, a freezer and a washing machine, which would have enabled Elisabeth and her children to live ”for several weeks” without need for new supplies from Fritzl.
”As a criminologist, you can never rule anything out. But as our investigations now stand, Fritzl acted on his own. There were no accomplices,” Polzer said.
Elisabeth and the children were finally released at the weekend, after the eldest of the children, 19-year-old Kerstin, was admitted to hospital in a critical condition.
Kerstin is still fighting for her life in an intensive care ward.
Elisabeth, her own mother, Rosemarie (69), and the five other children have been reunited and were being carefully shielded in a specially cordoned off ward of a psychiatric clinic, where they were receiving round-the-clock care.
Doctors called on the media to respect their privacy so they could try to make a fresh start. — AFP
