Terrorized family together at last

AMSTETTEN, Austria - In an "astonishing" scene, members of an Austrian family terrorized by decades of incest and imprisonment met for the first time at a clinic where psychiatrists are helping them recover, authorities said yesterday.

Details of the gathering emerged as police said DNA tests had confirmed that Josef Fritzl, 73, was the biological father of his daughter Elisabeth's six living children.

The retired electrician confessed Monday to imprisoning Elisabeth, now 42, for 24 years in a warren of soundproofed cellar rooms, sexually abusing her, fathering seven children with her and discarding the body of one - who had died in infancy - in a furnace.

Three of the children were locked in the underground labyrinth with their mother for years and had never met their other siblings or grandmother, who lived upstairs.

Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, had registered those other siblings with authorities, saying they had found them outside their home in 1993, 1994 and 1997, at least one with a note from Elisabeth saying she could not care for the child.

Hospital officials said Elisabeth, five of the children and Rosemarie Fritzl spent their first moments together Sunday.

"It is astonishing how easy it worked that the children came together, and also it was astonishing how easy it happened that the grandmother and the mother came together," clinic director Berthold Kepplinger said.

Elisabeth was 18 when she was imprisoned in the secret annex her father built beneath his home in Amstetten, a working-class town 75 miles west of Vienna.

Under the circumstances, she and the children were doing "quite well" in the care of specialists, Kepplinger said.

One of the children, a girl, 19, was in critical condition and undergoing dialysis at another hospital. She was not part of the reunion, hospital officials said.

Forensics experts yesterday carted boxes of belongings out of the Fritzl home, and investigators said they were combing through his other properties but had found no other hidden rooms.

Fritzl led his wife to believe that Elisabeth had run away to join a religious cult when she disappeared, and authorities said there was no evidence the wife knew what was going on or was involved.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, said Rosemarie Fritzl's other children told authorities they had noticed "absolutely" nothing about their father's double life.

Josef Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on rape charges, the gravest of his alleged offenses. Prosecutors said they were investigating whether he could be charged with "murder through failure to act" in the infant's death; that is punishable by up to 20 years.

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said his client was under psychiatric care.