Issue date: 4/29/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Associated Press Photo Police walk from the garden of the house where a 73-year-old man, identified as Josef F. allegedly kept his daughter Elisabeth F. in the cellar for 24 years, on Sunday.

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - A woman who went missing in 1984 was found by police over the weekend and told investigators that she had been held by her father in a cellar, where she was repeatedly raped and gave birth to at least six children, police said Sunday.

Authorities said that the father may have told acquaintances and relatives that his daughter had joined a cult and disappeared.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, told reporters that the father, identified as Josef F., had been taken into custody. Police said Josef and his wife had been raising three of their daughter's children. The other three grew up in the cellar.

"We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime," Interior Minister Guenther Platter said.

The case unfolded after a gravely ill teenager was found unconscious on April 19 in the building where her grandparents live, and taken to a hospital in the town of Amstetten. Told that the sick 19-year-old's mother was missing, authorities publicly appealed for her to come forward.

Officers received a tip and picked up the mother near the hospital on Saturday, police said.

The mother, whom authorities identified as Elisabeth F., told officers that she had just been released after two decades of captivity at the hands of her father. She said that on Aug. 28, 1984 her father had sedated her, handcuffed her and locked her in a room in the cellar of the family's apartment building.

In an interview with AP Television News, Polzer said that Josef F. had given police a code to unlock a hidden door, revealing the area where Elisabeth and the children had been held.

It had several rooms, an uneven floor and a very narrow hallway, Polzer said, adding that the door was very small, and that one had to bend one's head to get through.

"Everything is very, very narrow and the victim herself...told us that this was being continually enlarged over the years," Polzer said.

The area also contained sanitary facilities and small hot plates for cooking, Polzer said.

On its Web site, ORF reported that the rooms were at most 5.6 feet high and that the area had a TV.

The area also included a "padded cell," Hans-Heinz Lenze, a senior Amstetten district official, said in remarks broadcast late Sunday.

Elisabeth said her father had been sexually abusing her since she was 11. According to the police statement, Elisabeth said that she and her children got food and clothing only from her father and her mother, Rosemarie, had not been involved.

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