Josef Fritzl’s depravity revealed

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man held his daughter Elisabeth captive in an underground prison for 24 years and fathered seven children by her, pleaded guilty to charges of rape, incest, false imprisonment and coercion on the first day of his trial in St Poelten.

The pensioner, who shielded his face with a blue ring binder as he ran the gauntlet of the world's press on his way into court, denied a charge of murder against one of the children his daughter gave birth to and another of slavery.

The court was given an insight into the deparved underground world beneath Fritzl's family home as the prosecution outlined their case.

Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser told the court how Fritzl had raped his daughter an estimated 3,000 times while holding her in appalling conditions.

The jury heard that Fritzl had told the authorities he was building an nuclear bunker below his house when he began to construct the warren of rooms where he held Elisabeth and her family.

Burkheiser had the height of the adapted cellar, six feet, marked on the doorpost of the courtroom and passed the jury objects retrieved from the cellar where Elisabeth gave birth to her children. Many retched at the sheer pungency of 24-year-old mould.

She said he had lured his daughter into the cellar in August 1984 when she was 18 and sedated her by placing a cloth soaked with ether over her nose and mouth and slammed the door closed.

On the second day after her incarceration, he put an iron chain around her stomach, attaching it to a pole "so that she had no chance of escape".