Austria appeals for witnesses to incest horror

By Sylvia Westall

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - Police on Wednesday appealed to about a hundred people to help them piece together details of a quarter-century of incarceration of an Austrian woman and her children by her father and sexual tormentor.

Investigator Franz Polzer asked for help from all those who had lived in the block in the small town of Amstetten in whose cellar Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth in 1984, and then fathered seven children by her.

"I ask if perhaps any one of them may have seen something noteworthy that at the time may have seemed insignificant," Polzer told a news conference.

Incredulity is driving a judicial and public effort to understand how a man could have entombed his daughter under the noses of residents and authorities, and then kept three of the children he fathered with her underground their entire lives.

Austrian and German media reports have shown pictures and video clips of Fritzl contentedly holidaying without family members in Thailand and Cyprus.

Polzer said the cellar, which was sealed off behind a locked sliding concrete door, included separate sleeping, washing and cooking areas, and was equipped with a refrigerator, freezer and washing machine.

"This electrical equipment would have allowed the occupants of the dungeon to have survived for weeks," he said.

Two of the children who had lived in the cellar have now been reunited with three other siblings who were taken in as infants and raised by Josef and his wife Rosemarie.