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AMSTETTEN - It was a modern-day, windowless dungeon, reached by a small, hidden door.
The door could only be opened by a secret code.
And the only person who knew the code was the occupant's jailer. Her abuser. Her father.
Last night Austrians were struggling to come to terms with revelations of a house of horrors and a monster in their midst.
Forensic scientists were pouring over the cellar prison in which police say a man kept his daughter for 24 years, sexually abusing her and forcing her to give birth there to seven children.
One child died and three were removed by Josef Fritzl while the other three lived with their mother Elisabeth in the basement, never seeing the light of day.
A police spokesman said the woman's nightmarish version of events was "completely believable".
Police arrested 73-year-old Fritzl on suspicion of incest and abduction.
They said 42-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl told them her father lured her into the basement of the block where they lived in the town of Amstetten in 1984, and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
Elisabeth Fritzl agreed to make a "comprehensive statement" detailing her ordeal to the police after being assured she would have no further contact with her father, who she said abused her from the age of 11.
"She appeared greatly disturbed," said the spokesman.
The basement was a network of windowless chambers with facilities for sleeping, cooking and washing and one was described as a padded cell. They were lit by lightbulbs.
After Elisabeth Fritzl and her children emerged, Josef Fritzl, an electrical engineering technician by training, told investigators how to enter their basement prison through a hidden door operated by secret code.
"There was a shelf with plenty of cans and containers, and behind the shelf was a door made of reinforced concrete, secured electronically and running on steel rails, and only the suspect knew the code," said local official Heinz Lenze.
Some of the narrow rooms were no more than 1.70m-high. Their only window to the world was a television set.
"There are things that you just don't want to see," a policeman at the house told the Guardian. "The fewer pictures you have in your head the better."
Josef Fritzl's elaborate web appears to have come unstuck when one of the children in the basement became seriously ill and he allowed her to have treatment. The 19-year-old girl - the oldest of the three - became seriously ill and was said to have been dropped off at the hospital late last week. Doctors appealed for the girl's mother, who was believed to have disappeared, to come forward to provide more details about her medical history. The daughter tipped off police.
Fritzl then brought Elisabeth and her remaining two children out of the basement, telling his wife that their "missing" daughter had chosen to return home.
"This is not a mother abandoning her child which then had to be admitted to hospital in a serious condition," Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria, told broadcaster ORF.
"We know that she herself has been kept imprisoned by her own father for 24 years in the basement and furthermore she obviously was also subjected to sexual abuse."
Polzer described how Elizabeth Fritzl emerged with two of her children, both boys, from the house on Sunday after they were tracked down by police. "The two boys saw daylight for the first time in their lives."
Newspaper headlines called the case the "crime of a monster" and the "worst crime of all times" and stories questioned authorities and residents of Amstetten, 130km west of Vienna, for failing to notice "the martyrdom in the horror house" under their feet.
The case was the more shocking because it was reminiscent of that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch who spent eight years locked up in a windowless cell before escaping in August 2006.
"The community of Amstetten, including its population, should drown in shame. ... Just like in Strasshofen with [Wolfgang] Priklopil [the man who kidnapped Kampusch]. The neighbours are very thoroughly looking away," the Oesterreich newspaper wrote in an editorial.
"Obviously it was more convenient to look away from the neglected house then questioning its fabulous inhabitant of what he was doing behind his walls," it added.
The daily Der Standard wrote: "The whole country must ask itself just what is really, fundamentally going wrong."
Fritzl's wife Rosemarie had been unaware of what happened to her daughter when she 'disappeared' in 1984.
It was assumed Elisabeth had left voluntarily when her parents received a letter from her saying they should not search for her.
The Austrian state broadcaster ORF quoted the note as saying: "Do not search for me, it would be pointless and would only increase my and my children's suffering." Her note was also reported to contain another, obscure remark which was quoted as saying: "Too many children and an education are not wanted there."
ORF said this remark had led police to conclude that she had fallen into the hands of a religious sect.
But all the while she was being held captive.
Three of the children - Alexander, 12, Monika, 14 and Lisa, 16, - were brought up by Josef Fritzl and his wife after they appeared at the building where the couple lived in 1993, 1994 and 1997. The first child was accompanied by a note from Elisabeth Fritzl saying she was unable to care for the baby herself.
Three others, including the two eldest Stefan, 18 and Kerstin, 19, and the youngest, Felix, 5, had been locked up in the basement with their mother since birth.
Rosemarie, as well as Elisabeth and her children, were receiving psychological counselling. The Daily Mail reported that Elisabeth Fritzl was badly malnourished with white hair and white skin.
DNA samples of all those involved were taken and would be analysed, police said.
Josef Fritzl was said to have refused to make any statement to police under questioning.
Whatever its outcome, the scandal seemed certain to raise further grave questions about the conduct of Austrian police in cases involving missing persons, especially young girls.
Vienna police have been subjected to a barrage of criticism over the Kampusch case. Witnesses have argued that she could have been found and released much earlier if officers had been more thorough in their search methods.
Kampusch was abducted at the age of 10 in 1998 while walking to school in Vienna.
She was held for eight years in a small windowless cellar beneath a garage in the commuter town of Strasshof, 25km outside the Austrian capital. She escaped in August 2006.
Her kidnapper, 44-year-old Priklopil, committed suicide shortly afterwards.
- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS, AP
