Police files revealing that Josef Fritzl had previous convictions and charges for rape emerged today as his victims came forward to testify about their ordeals.

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Josef Fritzl, shown on a holiday in Thailand in 1998

Police files revealing that Josef Fritzl had previous convictions and charges for rape emerged today as his victims came forward to testify about their ordeals.

Officials in Linz, Upper Austria, found files from 1967 showing that Fritzl was a known sex offender. His record contains a conviction for a rape and an attempt rape as well as an arrest for public exposure.

At least two victims have come forward so far. A nurse from Linz, who claims she was raped by Fritzl in October 1967, when she was 24, told a local paper: "As soon as I saw his picture on TV I knew: It was him. I recognised him by the eyes. I could not sleep the whole night after that.

The nurse, who is now 65, said that Fritzl had slipped through her ground-floor bedroom window while her husband was away on work.

"I felt someone pulling the bedclothes back and I thought it was my husband coming home," she said. "But then I felt this knife being pushed against my throat.

"He told me: 'If you make a noise I'll kill you'. Then he raped me."

Fritzl served only 18 months for the rape, allegedly because a judge considered he should be reunited with his wife and four children.

The files also show that he attempted to rape a 21-year-old in the same year, but the victim was able to escape.

The revelations will embarrass the officers in charge of the investigation in Amstetten, where Fritzl kept his daughter Elisabeth, locked up in a dungeon beneath his home for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

Amstetten police and prosecutors had claimed that Fritzl had no criminal record. Even if he had been convicted, they said, Austrian law demanded that all records on sex offences are destroyed after ten years.

A spokesperson for the prosecutors handling the Fritzl case said: "We have requested to see these documents. We must examine them carefully as they obviously have great relevance for the case."

A third victim, who was 20 at the time, also came forward after seeing Fritzl's image in the news, to tell how he raped her in September 1967. But she did not report the case to the police because she did not want her friends and family to know about it.

Fritzl, then 32, reportedly worked in Linz at the time and stayed with his parents-in-law.

Meanwhile, Josef Fritzl's lodgers revealed today that he was stealing food from them to feed his captive family.

They said Fritzl would enter the flats he was renting on the ground floor of his three-storey house when the lodgers were away and steal food from their refrigerators

They also accused Fritzl of connecting the power supply of the dungeon to their meters, so they would be forced to pay large electricity bills.

Sepp Leitner, one of 100 lodgers who rented rooms in Fritzl's house during the years his family were imprisoned in the cellar, said paid "exorbitant" electricity bills despite the fact that he was never at home. After an electrician could not determine why the bills were so high. When Mr Leitner refused to pay them Fritzl threw him out.

Mr Leitner said: "I should have tried harder to resolve the puzzle with the high electricity consumption; perhaps that would have lead to the discovery of the dungeon much earlier.

"I now blame myself for not inspecting it more thoroughly."

According to Mr Leitner, Fritzl, deemed The Incest Monster by local press, had keys to the flats of all of the lodgers' flats and would enter when they were away to steal food for his captive family.

Mr Leitner said: "Food would disappear from the kitchens and the lodgers were asking themselves who would enter someone's flat to take food.

"A female lodger once said 'I bought milk yesterday, and now it is gone', others also started noticing. Sandwiches, noodles milk and other foods would disappear."

Fritzl would ban the lodgers from bringing animals into the house, for fears that a dog could sense the people in the cellar. He also banned them from entering the cellar.

A lodger currently living in the Fritzl house revealed yesterday that they heard "strange noises" and "knocking sounds" coming from the cellar.