Incestuous rapist Josef Fritzl can be moved from prison psychiatric unit after Austrian court ruling
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Josef Fritzl (centre) held his daughter captive for 24 years and raped her countless times, fathering seven children.
PHOTO: REUTERS
VIENNA - An Austrian court on May 14 ruled that the country's most infamous living criminal, the incestuous rapist Josef Fritzl, can be moved from a prison psychiatric unit to a regular prison, but release from incarceration was unlikely.
While a transfer could, in principle, pave the way for Fritzl’s conditional release from prison altogether, the court has said such a request was unlikely to be approved due to “special preventive reasons”.
Fritzl's lawyer Astrid Wagner said she would apply for such a release within a year of his transfer.
Citing his advancing dementia and frailty as factors, the court said in a statement: “He no longer poses a threat that requires being held in a forensic-therapeutic centre.
“In the same decision, the three-judge panel also ruled that a conditional release from regular custody, that is, being freed, is not possible for special preventive reasons.”
Given the “unprecedented criminal energy” he used, it was, therefore, not to be expected that he would be released altogether, the statement added.
Fritzl, who has now changed his name, held his daughter captive for 24 years in a dungeon he built under his home and raped her countless times, fathering seven children over the period.
The 89-year-old has been serving a life sentence in a prison unit for "mentally abnormal" inmates since his conviction in 2009 for incest, rape, enslavement, coercion and murder by neglect of one of the children – a newborn boy.
At a hearing in a courthouse in the town of Krems an der Donau near Vienna in January, the court allowed Fritzl’s transfer, only for a higher court to overturn that decision in March, ruling that the “facts necessary for such a conditional release” had not yet fully been established.
It sent the case back to the first court, ordering it to gain a fuller picture of Fritzl's suitability for a transfer.
The first court held a hearing in April inside the prison where Fritzl is detained. Prosecutors can still file a complaint against the decision to move him to a regular prison in a bid to get it overturned, as they did after the first ruling. REUTERS
