Tearful reunion in Austria; new facts surface in Fritzl case
Members of the Austrian family victimized by a depraved father who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her had an "tearful and astonishing" reunion at the clinic where they are getting psychiatric counseling.
The authorities said that the daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, most of her children and her "mother" met one another at the clinic.
"It was astonishing how easily it happened, how the mother and grandmother came together," the clinic's director, Berthold Kepplinger said. The doctors who witnessed the reunion said the two burst into tears and hugged each other for a long time.
Kepplinger said the family members interacted very naturally even though the three children who lived with their grandparents never met their siblings who had been imprisoned in the windowless cell totally weaned away from the outside world.
Officials said one of the children, who is receiving medical treatment at another hospital, was not part of the reunion. Kerstin Fritzl, 19, the first child to result from Elisabeth's enforced incest with her father, was still in hospital where doctors maintain that she is "fighting for her life" from the effects of an illness which was worsened by lack of medical attention on time. "She is in a coma and her condition has only marginally improved," a spokesman from the hospital said.
The police also announced that DNA tests had confirmed of Josef Fritzl being the biological father of all his daughter's six surviving children.
The police also informed that they had scanned Fritzl's other properties as well but thankfully did not find any more hidden cellars like the one where he had held his daughter, now 42, after being condemned to the cellular life at the age of 18.
Fritzl has confessed to holding his daughter captive, sexually abusing her, fathering her children and also "tossing into a furnace" the body of one child who was a still-born.
Officials say that Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses under Austrian law.
But prosecutors in Lower Austria said that they were looking into the possibility of charging Fritzl with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant's death. Murder in Austria is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
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