VIENNA — The whole of Austria is in shock as Austrian police on Monday searched a cellar at a house where a 73-year-old man is accused of holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering seven children.
Newspapers have been asking as to how authorities could have failed to notice that something was wrong.
Josef Fritzl the accused was arrested on Sunday and police are searching the house at Amstetten in eastern Austria where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were kept in rooms in the cellar where the ceiling was just 1.70 metres (5.5 feet) high.
How can this happen here?
asked Die Presse and the tabloid Oesterreich featured a six-page special report on what it termed as “the worst crime of all time.”
Austrian media express shock and dismay at the horrific details of alleged child abuse and imprisonment in a quiet provincial town.
The Amstetten case, in which a man allegedly imprisoned his daughter and abused her sexually for 24 years, has gripped the nation.
Austrian psychologists say the children allegedly born in the cellar and believed to have been held captive with their mother are most likely severely traumatised.
“After this case it will be impossible to carry on with business as usual,” writes Petra Stuiber in Austria’s Der Standard daily.
The suspect, identified only as Josef F, is alleged to have imprisoned his daughter in the cellar in 1984, when she was aged 18. Police say they believe she bore him seven children, one of whom died - but DNA tests should confirm that.
This type of case is not new to Austrians as this has happened twice in the past. Previously most notorious case was that of Natascha Kampusch, locked up by a man in the basement of a house for eight years before she escaped.
Three young girls were also locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near Linz.
In the current and third case Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, has accused her father drugging her in August 1984 and imprisoning her in the cellar and regularly abusing her for years.
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