Austrian town in shock that abuse went unnoticed

By Sylvia Westall

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - When he looks across the road from his shop to the house which has brought notoriety to a small town in Austria, Guenter Haller feels a chill.

"This is the friendliest town I've ever lived in. It is a complete shock to know that such a man lived across the road and did those horrible things to his daughter," the 42-year-old glazing salesman from Amstetten said on Monday.

"How the other tenants did not see anything escapes me."

Beneath the drab grey housing block Haller looks out on is the cellar where a 73-year-old imprisoned his daughter for 24 years along with some of her seven children he fathered.

The horrors have only now been discovered after one of the three captive children, a 19-year-old girl, fell seriously ill and had to be rushed to hospital.

The bustling and prosperous industrial town of Amstetten, in rolling hills 130 km (80 miles) west of Vienna, is in shock.

Josef Fritzl has confessed he lured his daughter Elisabeth, 42, into the basement of their block in 1984 and drugged, handcuffed and imprisoned her.

The building is on one of the town's busiest streets, lined with cafes, a florist and home decoration shops.

The entrance to the windowless cellar, which police said also contained a padded cell, was at the back of the block on a smart street lined with small family houses.

"Look at this, it's a residential area," said 32-year-old Sabine Ilk, gesturing at the row of cream and white houses with neatly tended front gardens.

"I grew up in Amstetten, it's a close community and just unbelievable nobody knew what was happening for all that time."

Forensic experts in white uniforms and gloves carried out boxes of evidence from the house as investigators combed the cells, whose locked entrance Fritzl hid behind shelves.

Three of Elisabeth and Josef's children, aged 5, 18 and 19, have been locked up since birth in a network of underground cells in places only 1.70 meters (5 ft 6 in) high, and have apparently never seen sunlight or received any education.

Another child died shortly after being born and Fritzl burnt the body in the heating system of the house. The electrical engineer and his wife Rosemarie raised the other two girls and a boy.

One Austrian newspaper turned its ire on the town of 22,000 people as a whole.