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73-year-old Josef Fritzl had planned to pump poisonous gas into the cellar if he were to come to any harm. -- PHOTO: AP
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AMSTETTEN (Austria) - THE Austrian man who for years incarcerated his daughter and three children he fathered with her threatened to gas their windowless bunker if anything happened to him, police said on Thursday.
As the family recovered in their own cordoned-off wing of a psychiatric hospital, police experts probed a claim allegedly made by 73-year-old Josef Fritzl that he planned to pump poisonous gas into the cellar if he were to come to any harm.
Fritzl, in custody since his arrest last weekend, made the statement during initial questioning, police spokesman Helmut Greiner said.
'It may have just been an empty threat to intimidate his daughter Elisabeth and the children he fathered into not trying to overpower him,' Mr Greiner said.
The technicians 'are trying to ascertain whether there really was a mechanism that would allow gas to be pumped in' to the secret warren where Elisabeth bore successive children from incestuous abuse over the course of 24 years.
Meanwhile, a report said that a former tenant in the house had come eerily close to discovering the underground prison a decade ago.
Mr Sepp Leitner told Friday's daily newspaper Die Presse that he lived for four years in a small flat on the ground floor immediately above the cellar in the 1990s.
Mr Leitner said he could never understand why his electricity bill was so high, considering he was frequently absent and did not even have a washing machine.
He said he did not realise he was paying the utility costs for the underground prison as well, which had an elaborate security system installed by Fritzl, a former electrician.
'If I'd been a bit more persistent and not let it go until the mystery of the high electricity consumption had been resolved, perhaps we'd have found out about the dungeon earlier,' Mr Leitner said.
Austria has been reeling since the horrific details of the family's unimaginable ordeal emerged last weekend.
Elisabeth, now 42, is said to have aged beyond her years with snow-white hair and decaying teeth.
The eldest of the surviving children, 19-year-old Kerstin, is in a stable but serious condition in an intensive care unit.
Authorities have urged the media to respect the family's right to privacy as they attempt to begin new lives.
Police have had to beat back photographers from the walls of the clinic where the victims are being treated and at the prison where Josef is in solitary confinement.
An Austrian held captive herself for more than eight years warned that the Amstetten victims should be careful about going public with their story too soon, if at all.
'I would advise them to think about it very carefully,' Ms Natascha Kampusch told German public television NDR in an interview.
'I hope the media have learned something in the wake of my own case.'
Kampusch, now 20, was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held by her tormentor until her dramatic escape in August 2006. She went public with her story very early on, giving an extensive newspaper interview about her ordeal.
Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer insisted the horrors in the Fritzl family and Ms Kampusch's ordeal was no reflection on the small Alpine country.
'We're not going to allow Austria and its entire population to be held hostage by a single, barbarous criminal individual,' he said in a May Day speech in Vienna.
In the Amstetten case, three of the children remained in the dank cellar with Elisabeth, never seeing daylight or the outside world.
A fourth, a twin, died shortly after birth. The remaining three 'grandchildren' were adopted by Josef and his 69-year-old wife Rosemarie, who was told the youngsters were abandoned by Elisabeth and left on their doorstep.
Rosemarie's younger sister said Josef would frequently stay the night underground.
'He would go down into the cellar every morning at seven, supposedly to develop plans for machines that he would sell to businesses,' the sister-in-law, identified only as Christine R., told the Oesterreich newspaper.
'Often, he would spend whole nights down there,' added the 56-year-old.
''Rosi' wasn't even allowed to bring him a coffee.' Fritzl was remanded in custody on Tuesday.
He is in isolation as a precaution because inmates locked up on paedophilia charges, particularly those who generate intense media coverage, are frequent targets of attacks by other prisoners, officials said.
'Based on our experience with shocking offences, particularly when children are the victims, there is a greater need to protect the suspect,' Mr Guenther Moerwald, head of the Sankt Poelten jail, told Austrian news agency APA. -- AFP
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