'Someone must have known'
2008-04-30 22:28
Vienna - Austrian police were on Wednesday not ruling out that other persons apart from those directly involved may have known about the shocking incest case in the town of Amstetten.
According to police colonel Franz Polzer, someone "with ties to the family must have known" that Josef Fritzl, 73, had imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter Elisabeth, 42, in a basement dungeon since 1984 and fathered seven children with her.
But Polzer said he did not believe the retired technician had accomplices - a view mirrored by other police officials.
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 remains in intensive care.
Authorities said they planned no further interviews with Fritzl this week. He has already made a full confession and, according to his lawyer, will not provide any more information for the time being. Fritzl is being detained at a prison in the provincial capital St Poelten.
Return to family planned
In comments made on Austrian public TV on Tuesday, Polzer said Fritzl may for some time have been planning an ostensible "return" of his daughter Elisabeth to the family home where, in reality, she had been kept a prisoner for 24 years.
A letter which he forced Elisabeth to write mentioned that she wanted to return to her family this summer.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that an earlier chance to put an end to the suffering of Elisabeth and three of her children imprisoned with her for all of their lives was missed in 1999.
A fire safety inspection of the cellar failed to uncover the dungeon, the entrance to which was hidden by a set of shelves, according to Herrmann Gruber, a spokesperson for Amstetten's mayor.
Meanwhile the condition of the family victims being treated at the neuropsychiatric clinic Amstetten-Mauer remained "relatively unchanged", doctors said.
Elisabeth's eldest daughter, 19-year-old Kerstin, was still in serious condition, receiving artificial respiration, an antibiotics treatment and dialysis.
Police said investigations at Amstetten's "house of horrors" would continue for at least another week.
In a further development, a woman in Linz, Upper Austria, claimed she had been raped by Fritzl in 1967. - Sapa-dpa
- SAPA