Fritzl cellar could be filled with concrete
A basement in which a 75-year-old man kept his own daughter for more than 24 years as his personal sex slave could be filled with concrete.Lawyer Walter Anzböck suggested today (Weds) to pour cement into the cellar chambers of the estate in Amstetten, Lower Austria, where Josef Fritzl raped his daughter Elisabeth, 46, more than 3,000 times. The woman bore her father seven children of whom six survived.Anzböck has been assigned as liquidator to handle the bankrupt real estate managers assets in a desperate bid to financially support his victims.Fritzl was found guilty of rape, incest, sequestration, grievous assault, enslavement and “murder by neglect” for letting a newborn die in a trial in St. Pölten two years ago. He is serving a life sentence in a prison in Krems.Anzböck said filling up the tiny rooms Fritzl forced his daughter and their incest children to live in could raise less attention than tearing down the whole estate. Town Hall chiefs initially favoured razing the building to the ground to stop people from all over the world visiting the “House of Horror.” Anzböck and Herbert Katzengruber, the Social Democratic (SPÖ) mayor of Amstetten, announced last year that the plan was to destroy the block of flats this spring. All other tenants of the building moved out shortly after the incest scandal became public in 2008.Katzengruber had no comment on Anzböcks new plan, but it is understood that Town Hall decision-makers are considering it amid fears of a media hype and neighbours outrage if the house is demolished during the day or at night. Anzböck pointed out today that the most important aspect was to protect the privacy of Fritzls victims who are now living in a remote town in the countryside.Only a few days ago, Viennese newspapers claimed Natascha Kampusch considered tearing down the house in Strasshof an der Nordbahn near Vienna where she was kept by pervert Wolfgang Priklopil for more than eight years until 2006. The paedophile kidnapper committed suicide hours after she managed to escape. Kampusch is quoted as saying that the building “became a burden for me.” The 21-year-old acquired the estate as well as Priklopils BMW a few months after she ran away from his clutches.Amstetten was in the news most recently when it emerged that Third Reich dictator Adolf Hitler was still a citizen of honour of the town 66 years after his suicide. The Town Hall parliament stripped Hitler of the title after a Green Party delegate uncovered the issue. The Freedom Partys (FPÖ) representatives controversially abstained from participating in the vote, arguing that such titles become obsolete when a person passes away.The towns mayor made headlines earlier this year when he labelled reports that local teenagers were regularly holding wild parties in Fritzls cellar dungeon as “nothing but idiotic lies”.Referring to articles in British newspapers, Katzengruber said: “Can our society sink to any further depths? In which world are we living? Im deeply shocked.”The Social Democrat added that the stories were “disgraceful and insane”.Newspapers in the United Kingdom claimed in February that teens have been celebrating boozy bashes in the secret basement rooms Fritzl set up to imprison his daughter.A member of a gang who intruded the site was quoted as saying: “Police stopped watching the place long ago. The walls are very thick. You can play music down there. No one will hear anything but the smell is atrocious.”