Europe Features
Austria's dungeon - 60 square metres without light or hope
By DPA
Apr 28, 2008, 16:04 GMT

Amstetten, Austria - A grey family home, dirty walls, high, impenetrable hedges ... the first impressions of Austria's 'horror house', where a father kept his daughter prisoner for 24 years, sexually abusing her and fathering seven children.

Inside, matters are worse - photos released by Austrian police show the true extent of the crime and the human tragedy involved.

Hidden behind a huge, steel-reinforced concrete door in the cellar lies the dungeon where Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, and three of her children had to vegetate for many years ... without sunlight or hope of fleeing their incarceration.

A small door hidden behind a shelf led to the rooms, about 60 square metres in total. The steel door could only be opened by remote control. The code was known only to Josef Fritzl, a retired technician from Amstetten, a town in the province of Lower Austria, and currently the country's most-hated man.

Via a five-metre corridor, the dungeon warder could enter the barely 1.7-metre high room with cooking and washing facilities where a few children's drawings and a toy elephant were found.

The dungeon's sparsely furnished rooms had empty cots decorated with children's drawings and little stars.

A TV set and videos were their only window to the outside world. But no natural windows let in fresh air or sunlight.

Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, spent all their lives in those rooms, imprisoned by their father who was also their grandfather. They never went to school or played in the garden, like their other three siblings did, who were taken from their mother as infants.

Josef claimed the 'missing' mother had left them at his doorstep.