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Shocking: Man Admits to Imprisoning his Daughter and Fathering 7 of her kids

According to the NY Post:

AMSTETTEN, Austria - A man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in a windowless cell with a soundproofed door and fathering seven children with her - including three who "never saw sunlight," police said yesterday.

Josef Fritzl, now 73, also told investigators that he tossed the body of one of the children in an incinerator when the infant died shortly after birth, said Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs.

Three of the surviving children lived with the grandparents and were registered with authorities. The other three - ages 19, 18 and 5 - were confined during their entire lives to the darkness of their cell, Polzer said.

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

The daughter, now 42, had been missing since 1984 and was found by police in the town of Amstetten on Saturday evening after police received a tip. She and the children have been placed under psychiatric care.

Authorities yesterday released several photos showing parts of the cramped basement cell, with a small bathroom and a narrow passageway leading to a tiny bedroom.

Investigators said an electronic keyless-entry system apparently kept the daughter from escaping from the cell.

Fritzl briefly appeared in court yesterday in the city of St. Poelten, where he was to be held in pretrial detention.

"He admitted that he locked his daughter, who was 18 at the time, in the cellar, that he repeatedly had sex with her, and that he is the father of her seven children," Polzer told The Associated Press.

Hans-Heinz Lenze, a senior local official, said Fritzl's wife apparently had "no idea" of what went on and was devastated.

"You have to imagine that this woman's world fell apart," he said.

Austrians - still scandalized by a 2006 case involving a young woman who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a basement cell outside Vienna for more than eight years - expressed disbelief at the latest case.

"The entire nation must ask itself just what is fundamentally going wrong," the newspaper Der Standard said yesterday in a commentary.

Guenter Pramreiter, who owns a bakery just down the street, told The Associated Press that the suspect and his wife would regularly buy bread and rolls, though never in large quantities.

"They appeared normal, just like any other family," he said. "I'm totally shocked, this was next door. It's terrible."