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. Josef Fritzl (73) has admitted to keeping his daughter locked in a windowless bunker, repeatedly sexually assaulting her and later imprisoning their children.
”Astonishing” and ”moving”, were the words used by psychiatrists on Tuesday to describe the scene as Elisabeth Fritzl and five of her children were reunited for the first time. The meeting followed years of separation after three of the children fathered through incest by Josef Fritzl were ”chosen” to live above ground.
DNA tests showed that Austrian Josef Fritzl, who raped his daughter and kept her prisoner in a windowless cellar for 24 years, was the father of her six surviving children, police said on Tuesday. Fritzl has confessed to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar beneath their two-storey home and fathering seven children by her.