Incest father pretended to be daughter in 1994 call

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - An Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar and fathered her seven children pretended to be the young woman in a phone call to his wife in 1994, a police official said on Thursday.

At the time, Elisabeth Fritzl had been locked in the windowless cellar of her parents' house for 10 years, without her mother's knowledge.

Faking his daughter's voice, Josef Fritzl called his wife and asked her to look after Elisabeth's baby who had been left on the doorstep.

"Rosemarie Fritzl made a report about it at Amstetten police station in 1994. This report was passed on to the prosecutors' office," Reinhard Nosofsky, regional police department official, told Reuters.

"She could not explain the call and had not recorded it. We now know it was Fritzl."

The prosecutors' office, which is responsible for missing and abandoned children, tried to get in touch with Elisabeth, who is now 42.

"They had no reason to search the house or to think she was in the cellar," Nosofsky said.

He pointed out authorities also had a letter from Elisabeth asking her parents to look after her baby and not to look for her. Police now know Fritzl forced her to write the letter.

"They had no reason to search the house or to think she was in the cellar," Nosofsky said.

DNA tests have confirmed that Fritzl, now 73, was the father of all six of his daughter's surviving children and prosecutors are investigating him for rape, incest, coercion and the death of the seventh child, whose remains he burnt in a furnace.

(Reporting by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Robert Woodward)