Family in Austrian incest case united

By Sylvia Westall

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - The family of an Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her have been united for the first time in what doctors described as an "astonishing" gathering.

Josef Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth emerged from the windowless basement where he had locked her up with three of her children and was reunited on Sunday with three other children from whom she had been separated shortly after birth. A seventh baby died in the cellar after it was born.

"They met each other on Sunday morning and it is astonishing how easily it worked that the children came together," Berthold Kepplinger, medical director of the Provincial Clinic of Lower Austria, told a news conference on Tuesday.

"The children are quite well," Kepplinger said.

Around 200 residents of Amstetten, the town where Fritzl constructed his "house of horrors", held a rainy candle-lit vigil in support of the family in the town square.

"The outside world seems to think Amstetten is a terrible town, and that people in the community do not care for one another. We want to show this is not true," said organizer Elisabeth Anderson.

Austria's justice minister presented a bill on Tuesday to strengthen the country's "victim protection law", particularly in matters of sexual abuse.

In a case that has shocked Austria and the world, Elisabeth, now 42, spent nearly a quarter of a century without seeing sunlight with her daughter aged 19 and two sons aged 18 and 5.

The three other children -- two girls and one boy -- lived in the house above the cellar with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, who also had seven children of their own.

Kepplinger said his clinic had a school where Elisabeth's children could be educated as part of their recovery process, and the three who had been locked up in the cellar could read and write, although not very well.

The reunion between Elisabeth and her mother Rosemarie had also been "astonishing", Kepplinger said.

DNA tests confirmed that Fritzl, a 73-year-old retired electrical engineer, was the father of all six surviving children his daughter had born, police said.

Prosecutors were now investigating him over the death of the seventh child, whose remains he had burnt in a furnace, and said he could be charged in connection with the child's death.

"Josef F. is being investigated for murder by failing to render assistance," prosecutor Peter Ficenc told Reuters, adding that the pensioner was also being investigated for rape, incest and coercion.

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