House of Austrian incest father to be razed

The building under which Austrian Josef Fritzl imprisoned and abused his daughter and children he fathered with her will be knocked down, a town official told Austrian media on Friday.

Fritzl, who is serving a life sentence for his crimes, held his daughter for 24 years in a cellar under the drab concrete housing block in the northern Austrian town of Amstetten and fathered seven children with her.

Mayor Herbert Katzengruber said local authorities had decided the building should be reduced to rubble, though a date had not yet been fixed.

"I would prefer it to happen under cover of darkness," he told the Austria Press Agency, explaining that he did not want the demolition to be a media spectacle.

The story of Fritzl's abuse sent shockwaves through Austria and the rest of the world when it was uncovered by chance in April 2008.

A provincial judge recommended demolition last year, saying the empty building was unlikely to find a buyer because of its troubled history. Its remaining tenants left shortly after Fritzl's crimes were discovered.

Fritzl, 74, was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2009 after a jury found him guilty of murdering one of his children through neglect. He had incinerated the baby's corpse in a furnace when it died shortly after being born in the cellar.

He was also found guilty of rape, incest, coercion and enslaving his daughter Elisabeth, now in her 40s, and of depriving her and three of her children of liberty.