Josef Fritzl began planning the dungeon in which he incarcerated his daughter, Elisabeth, for 24 years when she was 12 and was so meticulous that he provided his ”downstairs family” with ultraviolet rays, vitamin tablets and an aquarium, Austrian officials said on Monday.
Police said Fritzl (73) began to plan his secret bunker as early as 1978, six years before he drugged and imprisoned Elisabeth.
”We are working with certainty on the idea that already in the planning phase he had the intention to build a small space, a small secret, a small dungeon unknown to the building authorities,” said Franz Polzer, leading the investigation.
He said investigators had established that Fritzl had installed eight doors in the warren-like complex that separated Elisabeth and their children from the outside world. Five of the doors were opened with a ”highly sophisticated” cylinder key; the others were electronically operated via a key-code device.
”We’re not talking here of a Harry Potter film in which you press against a [secret] door and it opens,” said Polzer.
The 20 experts who were gathering clues from the damp confines of the 55 square metre bunker were having to take regular breaks owing to the lack of oxygen.
Polzer said that part of the cellar consisted of rooms built in the late 19th century under the existing family house, which Fritzl began extending in 1979, having received planning permission.
”Nobody except for Mr Fritzl knew about these spaces and we cannot rule out that there are more doors that we have yet to discover,” Polzer said, adding that for the first nine years of her incarceration, Elisabeth had lived in a 35 square metre space. In 1993, after she had given birth to four children, Fritzl added an extra room.
His daughter finally persuaded him to counter the lack of sunlight in the bunker, said Berthold Kepplinger, the head of the psychiatric clinic in which the 42-year-old and her children are being treated.
”Under pressure from his daughter, the accused delivered supplies of vitamin D products and a UV-lamp to the dungeon,” he said.
Elisabeth, two of the cellar children, the three children who were brought up by her parents, as well as her mother, Rosemarie, were continuing to receive treatment at a clinic in Amstetten. An anti-terrorist unit was brought in to secure the hospital after several incidents in which tabloid reporters tried to gain access to the family.
To help them feel at home, the quarters in the clinic in which the reunited siblings are living have been equipped with objects similar to those they were familiar with in the dungeon — including an aquarium.
Kepplinger said it was ”beautiful and nice” to see the family trying to organise their everyday life.
Their sensitivity to natural light was improving, too. ”We do not need to darken the rooms as much as we had to at the beginning,” he said. But the ”dungeon family” still had to wear sunglasses. A balanced diet and fresh air had also gone a long way to improving their health, he added, though they were still anaemic.
Fritzl is expected to be questioned later this week by a state prosecutor, who visited the site of the cellar on Monday. — Â