The Austrian pensioner who has admitted locking his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and fathering seven children with her broke his silence from his prison cell yesterday to protest against being "treated like a monster" by the media.

"I'm not a monster," Josef Fritzl, 73, told the German newspaper Bild, via his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer.




He condemned as "totally biased" media coverage of what Austrian authorities have referred to as "the worst such crime in history", adding that his treatment of his 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth and her children could have been worse. Three of the children were brought up by her in their windowless dungeon, while three grew up in the family house with Fritzl and his wife. The seventh died.

Fritzl, who has been in custody in the town of St Pölten since his arrest nearly two weeks ago, sharing a 12-square-metre cell with a man accused of gun crime, said he deserved credit for the mercy he had shown towards his 19-year-old daughter by Elisabeth, Kerstin. He claimed he had saved her life by taking her from the cellar to hospital. "Without me, Kerstin would not still be alive today," he said. "I made sure she got to hospital."

He stressed he could have easily killed the inhabitants of the cellar. "Then there would have been none of this fuss."



Comment: "To individuals with various psychological deviations, the social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world appears to be a 'system of force and oppression'. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule. ... The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them, and life for the psychopath is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, moments of pleasure, and temporary feelings of power. They often meet with failure along this road, along with force and moral condemnation from the society of those other incomprehensible people."

In Fritzl's twisted mind, he really is being harshly mistreated. In a perfect world he would not need to hide his daughter underground in order to debase her -- he would be able to do it out in the open without the harsh oppression of people with values. To himself, he really is a saint. After all, he has been persecuted for his way of life, which to him is the only way of life imaginable. In his own cult of "me", he has done everything right. He even managed to satisfy his own moral code for decades without the harsh oppression of we "other" folk. And if it's good for him, how can it NOT be good for anyone else?



Kerstin's admission to hospital on April 19 led to the case coming to light. Fritzl's claim that he had found his "granddaughter" in a semi-conscious state on his doorstep prompted suspicious medics to call in police. Seeing media appeals for the girl's mother to come forward, Elisabeth persuaded her father to take her to the hospital a week later, where they were taken for questioning.

It was then that Elisabeth broke her silence, having been assured that she would never have to see her father again.

Fritzl faced his first meeting with a prosecutor yesterday. Christiane Burkheiser questioned him for about two hours, concentrating on details of his life and career. He was said to have been "cooperative".

The Austrian authorities admitted for the first time yesterday that there were flaws in the way officials had handled the case. "Looking at everything that we know up to now, I can see a certain gullibility," said the justice minister, Maria Berger, referring to the readiness of the authorities to believe Fritzl's story that his daughter had run away to join a religious sect. In fact, she had been locked in a high-security cellar built specifically as a prison for her.

Berger said the fact that the authorities had not only believed his story that his daughter had dumped three of her children on his doorstep, but had subsequently allowed him to become their legal guardian with his wife, Rosemarie, was a mistake "which wouldn't be able to happen today".

In a special session of parliament, the chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer, said it was "inconceivable" that having served an 18-month jail term for rape Fritzl had been allowed to adopt one, and foster two, of his children by his daughter.

Meanwhile doctors said the so-called dungeon children were making progress. Berthold Kepplinger, head of the psychiatric clinic where they are being treated, said the youngest, five-year-old Felix, was improving his sense of orientation and becoming livelier by the day. "He is fascinated by human contact, by jokes and humour in particular," he said.