VIENNA: The cellar where Josef Fritzl kept his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered seven children with her is being sealed off with concrete, much to the relief of neighbours keen to forget one of Austria’s most horrific crimes.
Fritzl, 78, was sentenced in 2009 to life imprisonment in a special unit for the criminally insane for incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and for the negligent homicide of one of his infant sons. “The dungeon will be filled with concrete and thus sealed at the family’s request,” estate liquidator Walter Anzboeck told Friday’s edition of the Oesterreich newspaper.
The construction work began on Thursday and is expected to take a week, costing a total of ¤100,000 ($131,800). The idea is then to sell the house in the town of Amstetten in the province of Lower Austria, Anzboeck said.
Neighbours welcomed the news, though some said the house should be demolished. “Hopefully it will quiet down again and Amstetten will no longer be known as the Fritzl town,” Katharina Sitz, 34, told the Krone newspaper.
“There will always be crazy people who want to buy the house because of Fritzl. It should be torn down,” said Oliver Michailov, 45.
Krone quoted an unnamed neighbour as saying: “They should cement Fritzl in there as well.”
Reuters
