Horror dad threatened gas death

2008-05-01 14:11

Vienna - An Austrian man who held his daughter and her children prisoner in a windowless bunker for years told his victims they would be gassed to death if anything happened to him, investigators said on Thursday.

Federal police technical experts were at Josef Fritzl's house to investigate his claim that gas would be pumped into the dank 60-square-metre cellar, police spokesperson Helmut Greiner told AFP.

Fritzl has admitted to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children that she bore.

Fritzl, in custody since his arrest last weekend, had made the claim during initial questioning, Greiner said.

"It may have just been an empty threat to intimidate the captive woman and her children into not trying to overpower him," Greiner said.

All sorts of claims

The technicians "are trying to ascertain whether there really was a mechanism that would allow gas to be pumped in."

Experts were also examining another claim by Fritzl that the heavy concrete-reinforced door to the underground rooms where he imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter, would have sprung open automatically were he absent for an inordinate length of time.

"That also may be simply an empty claim," Greiner said. Either claim could have possible implications for sentencing when the case comes to trial, because, depending on their veracity, the victims would have either have been able to escaped or could have perished, he noted.

Fritzl, who police said had 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 underground dungeon from initially one room to three, measuring 60 square metres (646 square feet) in all.

No one was aware of the existence of the dungeon, not even fire inspectors who routinely checked a heating boiler in the cellar in 1999.

The entrance to the dungeon was reachable only via a labyrinth of different underground rooms.

Spend whole nights in cellar

The door itself, about one metre high and 60 centimetres wide, was reinforced with concrete and had an electronic lock that could only be opened with a remote control.

Fritzl was a retired electrical engineer and police believe he had the expertise to build such a door and install it by himself.

It was also reported that Fritzl would spend whole nights in the cellar, his sister-in-law said in an interview published on Thursday.

"He would go down into the cellar every morning at seven, supposedly to develop plans for machines that would sell to businesses," said the sister-in-law, identified only as Christine R in the Oesterreich newspaper.

"Often, he would spend whole nights down there," added the 56-year-old younger sister of Fritzl's wife Rosemarie. "'Rosi' wasn't even allowed to bring him a coffee."

Police in Austria say Fritzl - 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.

Christine R recalled Fritzl's dark past, saying: "I was 16 years old when he was jailed for rape. I found that offence repugnant, given how he had had four children with my sister."

She described her older sister - who police believe had no idea what evil her husband was up to downstairs at the family home in Amstetten - as "dominated and constantly belittled in public" by Fritzl.

- AFP