'She did not obey any rules, she hung around in dodgy bars all night, drank, smoked,' Josef Fritzl, 73, said of his daughter Elisabeth.

She was rescued last week from the underground bunker where she was kept with three of the children she bore.

'That's why I had to provide, I had to create a place in which I could keep Elisabeth away from the outside world, by force if I had to,' Fritzl said in comments released by his lawyer to the weekly magazine News yesterday.

'I grew up under the Nazis, drills and discipline meant a lot at the time. I probably adopted some of this, unconsciously of course. But I'm no monster,' he said, adding that he had agonised over whether to free her.

'My situation became crazier with every week that I held my daughter captive. I considered again and again whether I should let her go or not,' he told his lawyer.

Fritzl also denied abusing Elisabeth from the age of 11 as she has said.

'That's not true. I'm not a guy who abuses young children. It began later, much later. Not until she was downstairs (in the cellar),' he said.

Fritzl has admitted to holding Elisabeth, now 42, captive from the time she was 18 in a windowless cellar in his building and sexually abusing her, police said.

He admitted he started furnishing the cellar 'around 1981 or 1982', several years before he locked up his daughter and explained how this went unnoticed by his family and neighbours.

'The cellar in my building belonged to me and me alone. It was my kingdom, that only I had access to. Everyone who lived there knew it,' he said.

'Nobody would have dared to enter my kingdom or ask me what I was doing.'

Fritzl also claimed credit for having saved the life of his daughter. 'I could have killed them all. Then there would have been no trace. No one would have found me out.'

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS