AMSTETTEN, Austria - Austrian police say the man who held his daughter prisoner for 24 years and fathered seven children with her had no accomplices and planned his crime too meticulously to have been caught any earlier.
Faced with tough questions about how the shocking crimes could have gone undetected for so long, chief investigator Franz Polzer told reporters there was absolutely no indication Josef Fritzl, 73, was working with anyone.
Fritzl has admitted to keeping his daughter locked in a windowless bunker, repeatedly sexually assaulting her and later imprisoning their children.
Yet despite reports he had previously been convicted of attempted rape, the authorities saw no reason to investigate him further when he applied to adopt three of those children.
The head of Amstetten social services, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said by that time, any convictions had been expunged from his record as laid down in Austrian law.
"At the time of the first adoption on May 20, 1994, there were no convictions on either his record or that of his wife," Lenze said
Police said they were probing a possible link between Fritzl and the unsolved murder of a teenager in 1986 although they admitted there was no direct connection so far.
Austrian authorities and the government have been hit by uncomfortable questions as to how a string of horrific child abuse cases could have occurred in the small Alpine republic in just a few years.
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