Incest & imprisonment revelations stun Austria

AMSTETTEN: Austrians expressed shock and horror on Monday after police arrested a 73-year-old man they say imprisoned and abused his daughter in a windowless basement for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

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, 130 km 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 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 popular Austrian daily, Der Standard, wrote: “The whole country must ask itself just what is really, fundamentally going wrong.”

A reader asks Austria’s Wiener Zeitung daily: “How is such a thing still possible today and how many people maybe still live in such circumstances? How can the authorities be duped so easily? One can only hope that these poor creatures get adequate psychiatric help.”