Report: Girl tied to a leash

2008-05-04 19:09

Vienna - Further gruesome details in Austria's "house of horrors" incest case came to light on Sunday as the condition of one of the victims was described as having stabilised.

Kerstin, 19, the daughter of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was held captive by her father for 24 years, repeatedly raped and gave birth to seven children by him, remained in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Amstetten, a spokesperson said.

The teenager had been in an artificially induced coma for the last two weeks and was on a ventilation machine.

Her life-threatening illness led to the release on April 24 of her mother and two of her siblings from the basement cellar under 73-year-old Josef Fritzl's home in the small east Austrian town.

Kerstin and her siblings spent their lives along with their mother in the cramped space underneath the house.

Meanwhile, the chief of the police in Lower Austria Frantz Polzer gave additional details of the case on Sunday. He confirmed to Austrian news agency APA details about the dungeon from Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth's published by German weekly Spiegel.

Incestuous rape in front of small children

It said that Elisabeth was handcuffed to a post for the first two days underground, when she was 19 years old. She was then tied to a leash for the next six or nine months so that she could go to the toilet on her own.

The magazine said that for the first nine years of her imprisonment the dungeon comprised just one room, implying that incestuous rape took place in the presence of young children.

From 1984 to 1993, "repeated rapes committed by Josef Fritzl took place in front of children born in 1988, 1990 and 1992," the report cited Elisabeth's testimony to police as saying.

A major task of police was to establish whether Fritzl was serious about his alleged threat to gas the occupants of his windowless bunker if anything happened to him.

Fritzl's lawyer Rudolf Mayer meanwhile recommended that that his client be locked away in a psychiatric facility, in comments to Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Police received anonymous information last week that Elisabeth, accompanied by her father, was to visit her daughter in a local hospital where the 19-year-old had been admitted.

Elisabeth then gave details of the years she spent in the cellar while her father told relatives she had run off to join a cult, leaving three children on his doorstep over the years. One of the seven children she had had by him had died in infancy.

Mother exonerated

Spiegel further reported that Elisabeth exonerated her mother Rosemarie, who had borne seven children by Fritzl.

The 42-year-old Elisabeth, who was receiving medical and psychological treatment together with all her children, spelled out that Rosemarie "knew nothing of her incarceration, and had nothing to do with (Elisabeth's plight)".

Polzer also told Kurier that Fritzl had installed a thick steel door in his cellar before imprisoning his daughter there in 1984. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA