Incest dad threatened to kill with gas

THE Austrian who held his daughter captive for years and fathered her children in a bunker threatened to kill them if anything happened to him, police said.

THE Austrian who held his daughter captive for years and fathered her children in a bunker threatened to kill them if anything happened to him, police said.

As the family recovered in their own cordoned-off wing of a psychiatric hospital, police experts probed a claim allegedly made by 73-year-old Josef Fritzl that he planned to pump poison gas into the cellar and kill his daughter and their offspring if he were harmed.

Fritzl, in custody since his arrest last weekend, made the statement during initial questioning, police spokesman Helmut Greiner said today.

"It may have just been an empty threat to intimidate his daughter Elisabeth and the children he fathered into not trying to overpower him," Greiner said.

The technicians "are trying to ascertain whether there really was a mechanism that would allow gas to be pumped in."

Experts were also examining Fritzl's claim that the reinforced concrete door to the secret dungeon where he imprisoned and sexually abused Elisabeth, now 42, for more than two decades, would have sprung open automatically were he absent for a lengthy period of time.

Austria has been reeling since the horrific details of the family's unimaginable ordeal emerged last weekend.

Forced to bear seven of Josef's children during her 24 years as a prisoner in a cramped underground cell beneath the family home, Elisabeth is said to have aged beyond her years with snow-white hair and decaying teeth.

The six surviving children are recovering in hospital, with the oldest, 19-year-old Kerstin, in a stable but serious condition in an intensive care unit.

Authorities have urged the media to respect the family's right to privacy as they attempt to begin new lives.

Police have had to beat back photographers from the walls of the clinic where the victims have been sequestered and at the prison where Josef is being held.

An Austrian held captive herself for more than eight years warned that the Amstetten victims should be careful about going public with their story too soon, if at all.

"I would advise them to think about it very carefully," Natascha Kampusch told German public television NDR in an interview broadcast late yesterday.

"I hope the media have learned something in the wake of my own case."

Kampusch, now 20, was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held by her tormentor until her dramatic escape in August 2006.

She went public with her story very early on, giving an extensive newspaper interview about her ordeal.

In the Amstetten case, Elisabeth became pregnant seven times as a result of the incestuous abuse by her father.

Three of the children remained in the dank, cramped cellar with her, never seeing daylight or the outside world.

One of the children, a twin, died shortly after birth.

The other three "grandchildren" were adopted by Josef and his 69-year-old wife Rosemarie, who was told the children were abandoned by Elisabeth and left on their doorstep.

Rosemarie's younger sister Christine said Josef, a retired electrician, would stay the night underground.

"He would go down into the cellar every morning at seven, supposedly to develop plans for machines that would sell to businesses," said the sister-in-law, identified only as Christine R, in the Oesterreich newspaper.

"Often, he would spend whole nights down there," added the 56-year-old.

"'Rosi' wasn't even allowed to bring him a coffee."

Christine R described Josef as a tyrant who "dominated and constantly belittled" Rosemarie in public.

Austrian authorities have been on the defensive, saying Fritzl had no accomplices and planned his crime too meticulously to have been caught any earlier.

Investigators believe no one was aware of the existence of the purpose-built dungeon, not even fire inspectors who conducted a routine check on a heating boiler in the cellar in 1999.

The entrance to the chamber was reachable only via a labyrinth of different underground rooms.

The door itself was reinforced with concrete and had an electronic lock that could only be opened with a remote control.

Police believe that Fritzl had the necessary know-how to build such a mechanism himself.

The case has taken its toll on the 22,000 residents of Amstetten, 100 km west of Vienna, as they ask how such a crime could have gone overlooked for nearly a quarter-century.