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AMSTETTEN, Austria: An elderly Austrian confessed Monday to holding his daughter - now 42 years old - captive for 24 years in a windowless dungeon and fathering her seven children, prosecutors said.
Josef Fritzl, 73, who faces protective custody in the coming days, "admitted building the dungeon and to holding his daughter and three children there," prosecution spokesman Gerhard Sedlacek told AFP.
Fritzl also admitted incest, "but insisted there was no force involved," said Sedlacek.
Chief investigator Franz Polzer told a press conference Monday: "He admitted ... to moving her (into the cellar) by force, hitting her, locking her up against her will and he also admitted to repeatedly abusing this young woman -- his own daughter -- sexually."
Fritzl was moved Monday evening from Amstetten, where he was initially held by police for questioning, to the court in nearby St Poelten where he is due to appear before a magistrate in the next 48 hours, a court official told AFP.
He faces several more days of questioning over a case which has turned Amstetten, about 100 kilometres west of Vienna, into a global media circus.
Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth has alleged she was drugged by her father in August 1984 and had been his prisoner ever since, giving birth to seven children in the "dungeon" he built in the basement of his apartment building.
Fritzl legally adopted three of the children when they were still babies, allegedly telling local authorities and his wife Rosemarie, 69 -- with whom he already had seven children -- that his daughter had left them on the doorstep, with letters saying she could not support them.
He had previously declared his daughter missing and said she had joined a sect.
Elisabeth Fritzl and the three other surviving children, aged 5 to 19 and who had until now never seen sunlight, were kept in three cramped underground rooms.
The seventh child died shortly after birth and Fritzl "disposed of it in the furnace of his building," Polzer told journalists.
The case came to light after the eldest, Kerstin, 19, was admitted to hospital on April 19 with serious health problems.
Doctors looking for medical clues launched a media appeal looking for the mother, leading Fritzl to let his daughter out of her cell.
Photographs of the rooms, just 1.70 metres high and measuring "50-60 square metres in all," according to Sedlacek, were released by police Monday.
They showed a well-furnished living area, with sink, shower, kitchen and two small bedrooms.
But all this was hidden behind a reinforced concrete door that could only be opened with a numbered code and the prisoners' only contact with the outside world were a radio, television and video cassette recorder.
This, ironically, helped Elisabeth Fritzl escape, after she saw the hospital's appeal on television and persuaded her father to let her out, Polzer said.
Kerstin was still "critical but stable," hospital doctors said, without giving more details about her illness.
Her mother and siblings are currently under psychiatric care. Elisabeth Fritzl looks 20 years older than her age, with white hair and a lined face, according to Polzer.
"This case is unique in this country's criminal history," Franz Pucher, Lower Austria's police security chief told journalists.
Polzer added there was "a wide range of questions that still need answering": how Fritzl fed his captives, how the babies were born and cared for in such cramped conditions, and how he could have incarcerated his victims for so long without his wife knowing?
Elisabeth Fritzl told investigators her mother knew nothing of the sexual abuse she had endured since the age of 11, while the trio who lived with Fritzl and his wife went to school as normal, seemingly unaware that their mother and three other siblings were trapped underground.
Neither neighbours nor social services appear to have had any inkling, either.
This is the latest in a series of horror abuse cases to have stunned Austria, following that of Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998, and held captive for over eight years in the basement of a house near Vienna before escaping two years ago.
Three young girls near Linz, in northern Austria, were also locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother. - AFP/ir
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