Fritzl wanted to recreate family

2008-05-05 22:10

Amstetten - The man accused of holding his daughter as a sex slave in a windowless bunker for 24 years was trying to recreate his first family, but this time with a younger, prettier woman, investigators said on Monday.

"His motive was to recreate once again the situation he had with his first family, the legal family, but this time with a good-looking young daughter," chief investigator Franz Polzer told journalists on the sidelines of a news conference here.

Josef Fritzl, 73, has admitted to imprisoning and sexually abusing his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, for 24 years in a specially-built dungeon beneath the family home.

Seven children were born of that abuse, the same number he had already fathered with his wife Rosemarie.

In each set of children, there was even a pair of twins, Polzer said.

"The daughter had twins at the same point in time as there had been twins in her own family, only one generation earlier. It's a remarkable parallel," Polzer said.

Of the seven children born from incest, three remained locked in the dungeon with their mother, Elisabeth. Another three were legally adopted by Fritzl as his "grandchildren" and lived upstairs with him. The seventh, a twin, died shortly after birth.

- AP