Details of secret incest case gathered

United for the first time, the family of the man who confessed to fathering seven children with his daughter celebrated the birthday of one of the kids, police said on Wednesday, as they pieced together the family's ordeal.

Investigations remained focused on the crime attributed to the suspect by his own confession and DNA testing - the confinement of his daughter for 24 years to a basement dungeon where she raised six children he sired. A seventh child died in infancy.

But police suggested they were also looking into possible links to other crimes.

Alois Lissl, the chief of police of Upper Austria province, said that, although no evidence had surfaced so far, police have widened their investigation into an unsolved murder 22 years ago to include the incest suspect because he could have been in the area at the "time and place" of the killing.

The bound body of Martina Posch was found on a shore of the Upper Austrian lake of Mondsee on November 12, 1986. The wife of the incest suspect owned part of an inn and camp ground on the other side of the lake at the time.

Lissl said the incest suspect would be asked for an alibi because the property owned by his wife could mean he was in the area when Posch was killed.

Still, Lower Austrian police said the main focus of the ongoing investigation was to clear up what Josef Fritzl did to his daughter, Elisabeth, in the dungeon.

Medical personnel in Lower Austria, meanwhile, fought to save the life of the young woman whose hospitalization triggered the discovery that her family had been imprisoned and terrorized for decades. And authorities weighed the future of her five siblings.

Kerstin Fritzl's condition was critical but stable, authorities said. The 19-year-old is one of the children Josef Fritzl says he fathered with his daughter Elisabeth.

Kerstin, who is in an induced coma and on a respirator, is undergoing dialysis because of the effects of lack of oxygen.

Agencies

(China Daily 05/02/2008 page6)