Elisabeth Fritzl kept captive 24 years by dad, has seven children
April 28, 2008 | 5 Comments
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A 73-year-old man is accused of locking his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her.
Three of the children were locked up with their mother since birth and had never seen sunlight or received any education, police said.
The father entered the basement prison through a small hidden door, operated by a secret code which only he knew.
Daughter drugged
His daughter Elisabeth Fritzl, now 42, told Austrian authorities her father Josef lured her into the basement of the block where her family lived in 1984, and drugged and handcuffed her before locking her up in the dungeon.
“There is not only one, but a number of rooms: one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities,” Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria, told broadcaster ORF.
Elisabeth gave birth to seven children during her ordeal, one of whom died shortly after being born, police said.
Her plight only came to light after her oldest child had to go to hospital and suspicious doctors alerted police.
Missing person
Josef’s wife Rosemarie had been unaware of what happened to her daughter and it was assumed Elisabeth had disappeared voluntarily when her parents received a letter from her saying they should not search for her.
Interpol had opened a file on her disappearance and local authorities believed she had fallen into the grip of a religious sect.
Police said three of Elisabeth’s younger children were abandoned at the family home, the first accompanied by a letter saying Elisabeth was unable to care for the baby herself.
All were taken in by Josef and his wife as foster or adopted children.
But the two oldest children, aged 18 and 19, and the youngest, aged five, remained locked up with their mother.
Medical drama
The case only came to light when the oldest child became seriously ill and was taken to hospital in the family’s home town of Amstetten. Josef said that the child had also been left unconscious on his doorstep, according to media reports.
A 19-year-old girl, who was seriously ill and is still fighting for her life, was last weekend dropped off at the hospital in Amstetten, a town of around 22,000 some 130km west of the capital Vienna.
Doctors appealed for the girl’s mother, who at that time was believed to have disappeared, to come forward to provide more details about the daughter’s medical history.
Josef then brought Elisabeth and her remaining two children out of the dungeon, telling his wife that their “missing” daughter had chosen to return home, police said.
Years of abuse
“This is not a mother abandoning her child which then had to be admitted to hospital in a serious condition … We know that she herself has been kept imprisoned by her own father for 24 years in the basement and furthermore she obviously was also subjected to sexual abuse,” Mr Polzer said.
After questioning and assurances that she would have no further contact with her father - who she said abused her from the age of 11 - Elisabeth agreed to make a “comprehensive statement”.
Rosemarie, as well as Elisabeth and her children were receiving psychological counselling. DNA samples of all those involved were taken and would be analysed, police said.
Life in captivity
Two other spectacular cases of captivity have emerged in Austria in recent years.
Natascha Kampusch was locked up by a man in the basement of a house in a Vienna suburb for eight years before she escaped.
Ms Kampusch was 10 when Wolfgang Priklopil abducted her on her way to school in 1998. The 44-year-old kidnapper killed himself just hours after she fled by throwing himself under a train.
In another case, three young girls were locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near the city of Linz.
Nine hacked to death in jail machete riots
April 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Nine prisoners, eight from gangs, died after a fight … in the San Pedro Sula penitentiary,” said Security Ministry spokesman Hector Mejia.
TV images showed blood-stained corridors in the jail in Honduras’ second city following the riot, which was believed to have been provoked by a prisoner who shot a fellow inmate.
Police later took control of the jail in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ manufacturing center and its most violent city.
The jail holds some 3000 inmates but was built to hold far fewer.
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are overrun with violent youth street gangs, known as ‘maras’ that trace their origins back to Salvadoran immigrants on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s.
Operator, there’s an alligator in my kitchen
April 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A WOMAN who was confronted by a huge alligator that had wandered into her kitchen had trouble convincing emergency services it wasn’t an iguana.
US woman Sandra Frosti called 911 after finding the 2.4m alligator in the kitchen of her Florida home after investigating the source of some strange noises.
“I heard a noise from the kitchen and it was much too loud to be my cat, so I went to check it out,” Ms Frosti said.
“Much to my surprise a very large alligator was in my kitchen.”
A recording of Ms Frosti’s phone call to US emergency services number 911 has since become an internet hit.
Ms Frosti called from a phone in her bedroom, but the disbelieving operator asked if the reptile in her kitchen was actually an iguana.
“Oh-no, no, no, no, no,” Ms Frosti told the operator.
According to Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, the alligator pushed a screen door to the house open and walked into Ms Frosti’s living room.
It then walked down a hallway before reaching the kitchen.
Ms Frosti said there were indications that her cat’s life might have been at risk.
“He looked awfully well fed… the police seem to think he was checking out my cat.”
Zoo plea after hoax: Stop calling our animals
April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
DUBLIN Zoo has appealed to the public not to be taken in by hoax text messages that have led to its switchboard being jammed by an estimated 100,000 calls in two weeks.
People are receiving text messages to their mobile phones asking them to ring the zoo’s phone number for an “urgent message”.
The texts are signed with names like G Raffe, C Lion, Rory Lyons and Anna Conda.
“This is proving to be a very serious waste of our time and resources,” the zoo said.
The zoo’s marketing manager Veronica Crisp told RTE state radio they had previously got hoax calls on a few days of the year like April Fool’s Day but the current situation “was getting out of hand”.
“It might be kind of funny the first few times but we have lost our sense of humour now with calls coming in at a rate of about 13 a minute. The system is pretty much choked,” she said.
Crisp said the police and Ireland’s communications watchdog had been unable to help.
Children recruited as suicide bombers
April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Since 2004, an increasing number of children have been recruited into various militias and insurgent groups, including as suicide bombers,” Radhika Coomaraswamy told a news conference in the Jordanian capital Amman.
“It is an intolerable situation,” said Ms Coomaraswamy, special representative of the secretary general for children and armed conflict.
Winding up a week-long visit to Iraq, she said children there are the silent victims of the ongoing violence in the country, with approximately 1500 “known to be held in detention facilities”.
“Many of them no longer go to school, many are recruited for violent activities or detained in custody. They lack access to the most basic services and manifest a wide range of psychological symptoms from the violence in their everyday lives.”
She said only 50 per cent of primary school children were attending school, down from 80 per cent in 2005. Only 40 per cent had access to clean drinking water and there was a continuing possibility of outbreaks of cholera.
She called on religious, political, military and community leaders to send one clear message to Iraqi children: “Stay out of violence and go back to school.”
Ms Coomaraswamy strongly urged all parties to the conflict in Iraq “to strictly adhere to international humanitarian standards for the protection of children and to immediately release any children under the age of 18 years who are associated with their forces in any way”.
