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Incest dad: I cared for my secret family
Associated Press
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6:35 a.m. PT May 8, 2008
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- The man accused of imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering seven children with her says he knew his actions were not right and that he must have been crazy, according to a magazine article.
Josef Fritzl's lawyer Rudolf Mayer has confirmed to The Associated Press the comments he relayed to Austrian magazine News, which were published Thursday.
The magazine quotes Fritzl as saying that he tried as best he could to care for his secret family and would take flowers, books and stuffed toys down to the dungeon below his home in the town of Amstetten where he held them captive.
Fritzl, in other comments, says he grew up an only child in simple circumstances and that his mother, whom he admired very much, threw his father out of the house when he was four.
The 73-year-old agreed Wednesday to further questioning, prosecutors said.
Fritzl and prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser did not discuss allegations that he repeatedly raped his daughter over two decades, fathering seven children, an official said.
But he agreed during their roughly two-hour talk -- Fritzl's first face-to-face meeting with a prosecutor -- to provide further testimony, St. Poelten prosecution spokesman Gerhard Sedlacek said. Further questioning is not planned for at least two weeks, he said.
Authorities say Fritzl initially confessed, after news of the family's existence surfaced last month, to keeping daughter Elisabeth, now 42, and some of their seven children locked in a reinforced basement cellar.
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But Fritzl, who has not been charged, has not elaborated further on his confession. Sedlacek said he provided the prosecutor Wednesday with details about his background, including his professional career.
The underground family came to light April 19 when the oldest child, a 19-year-old woman, was hospitalized with a severe infection in Amstetten, west of Vienna.
Doctors, unable to find medical records for the woman, appealed on TV for her mother to come forward. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital April 26.
He subsequently told police that he had fathered seven children with Elisabeth: three kept all their lives in the cellar, one adopted by him and his wife, two others raised in their custody and one who died as an infant.
In Amstetten, specialists continued to sift through the Fritzl home for evidence. Chief investigator Franz Polzer said that in addition to the cellar, Fritzl had deemed several rooms of the vast house off-limits to others.
These are now being examined in detail, he said. At some point, investigators also are planning to check the yard using sonar technology.
"We don't have any concrete reason to suspect there is anything else, but we want to be absolutely sure," Polzer said.
Justice Minister Maria Berger acknowledged that authorities may have shown a certain "gullibility" in accepting Fritzl's claim when Elisabeth first disappeared in 1984 that she had run away to join a cult.
"Today, one would certainly pursue this more precisely," Berger told Der Standard newspaper in an interview published Wednesday.
Local authorities in Lower Austria province have maintained that they acted appropriately.
Mayer said his client had access to a television in jail and was closely watching coverage of his case, which has garnered worldwide attention.
Mayer said Fritzl was bothered by the fact that he was being made out to be a monster. He said Fritzl told him, "I'm only being portrayed as a monster and not as someone who committed monstrous acts."
Mayer made his comments when asked to confirm a report Wednesday by the newspaper Oesterreich that quoted Fritzl as saying he was not a monster and that without him, his 19-year-old daughter Kerstin would no longer be alive.
Berger told parliament that what happened to the Amstetten victims "couldn't be made right" and stressed the need to better shield children from sex abuse.
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and Vice Chancellor Wilhelm Molterer announced plans to tighten laws for sex offenders.
"We will boost prevention because it is most important that criminal offenses are averted," Gusenbauer said in a statement.
Fritzl was reportedly convicted of rape in 1967. On Wednesday, Gusenbauer said that the federal government considered it "completely inconceivable" that a convicted sex offender was able to adopt a child and that such individuals would be allowed to do jobs involving contact with children and adolescents
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