Tearful reunion in Austria; new facts surface in Fritzl case

• IBTimes RSS
• Print
• E-Mail
• digg
• Del.icio.us

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, neither confirmed nor denied Austrian media reports that Fritzl had past run-ins with the law.

"If there was an offense outside of the statute of limitations, I can't comment on that," he said, refusing to elaborate.

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said his client was also under psychiatric care. Asked whether he showed any remorse, Mayer only said, "I cannot say much at this point".

"Josef Fritzl is really hit by this. He is very serious, but he is emotionally broken," Mayer said.

But a prosecutor, Gerhard Sedlacek, said Fritzl was "completely calm, completely without emotion" when he was formally placed in pretrial detention.

A new twist in the abuse case is the surfacing of Josef Fritzl's holiday snaps from Cyprus disgusting Austrians and the world alike as to how could a man go around and holiday leaving behind his own daughter and children in a windowless cellar.

Numerous papers have published pictures of Fritzl relaxing on beaches in Cyprus and Thailand.

As one of the news-daily captioned "Beast beside the seaside" it is mortifying that his imprisoned family had to survive alone for up to three weeks while he sunned himself.

Residents in the town of Amstetten, 75 miles from Vienna, are still struggling to deal with the enormity of the crime as more details of the so-called "House of Horrors" unfolded. A vigil was planned in the town as a sign of solidarity towards Elisabeth and her children as the world's media filled the streets. Flowers were laid by sympathisers in Ybbsstrasse, where the Fritzls lived.

More than 200 people came to Amstetten's main square and lit candles for the victims of the family tragedy. The event was organized by a spontaneously founded citizens' initiative. Earlier the town's mayor had said, "We want to show that this is not a town of criminals and to counteract the impression of Amstetten which has arisen."

"We have been surrounded by shock, sadness, anger, perhaps even hate in the last few days. We were forced to recognize that there is something in our town that we cannot comprehend. The town's residents now had to help and show solidarity so that a life is possible for the children and women," said local priest Peter Bösendorfer.

• 1
• 2
• 3