Austrian arrested over 40-year rape of daughters: Police

[MarrickG]

Austrian police announced Thursday they had arrested an 80-year-old man suspected of sexually abusing his two daughters over more than 40 years, keeping them virtually locked up in his house.

The man was arrested at the prosecutor’s request on suspicion of assault, duress, rape, and abuse and neglect of minors or defenceless persons among other offences, Alois Lissl, police chief for Upper Austria told the Austria Press Agency (APA).

The suspect, who was detained as a flight risk, has been sent to a jail in Ried im Innkreis.

Upper Austria police announced earlier Thursday that the unnamed 80-year-old was suspected of abusing his two daughters, now aged 53 and 45, physically and sexually from 1970 until May 2011.

He also prevented them from having any social contact outside the home and regularly threatened them with weapons and even death, the police said in a statement.

The case reached the authorities in early May after a social worker notified the police.

The man had tried to rape his oldest daughter, who pushed him away and he fell. Unable to stand up or call for help, he was eventually found by the social worker, whom the daughters had called two days later, police said.

For years, the man and his daughters shared just one room of their house in the district of Braunau, near the German border, police added.

Neither the suspect’s and victims’ names, nor the town where the events happened have been released.

The two women testified that they had to sleep on a small wooden bench and that their mother – who died in 2008 – was also regularly abused by her husband.

“They were evidently locked up in their own house, hardly ventured out into the open,” Lissl told Austrian television ORF.

“They received (outside) care but were evidently so intimidated that they kept quiet about these acts their entire life.”

“The alleged victims exhibit some mental deficiencies,” local police chief Martin Pumberger told APA.

He added the suspect had denied all the accusations against him.

As an interim measure, the man had already been banned from returning to his home for at least six months, according to a prosecution spokesman.

Before his arrest, he was staying in a nursing home in Braunau, after a spell in hospital for treatment after his fall, police spokeswoman Hermine Prokesch also told AFP.

The case eerily brings to mind an earlier Austrian incest story, that of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, one of whom died.

Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison in March 2009.

 

[krafty]

hi,marrick, i noticed most of your posts are related to sexual crime. do you have a fetish for that kind of thing?

 

[singveld]

The horror basement where sisters were raped for 41 years by their father and slowly went mad

This is the disgusting dungeon where an Austrian man violated his own daughters in a nightmare spanning 15,000 days and nights.

'If you fight back, then I will kill you,' Gottfried W. told his children Christine, 53, and Erika, 45, who were forced to sleep at night on a wooden shelf while their father, now 80, snoozed in a feather bed.

Amid farming implements, old oil drums, wood, cement sacks and filth he violated his own flesh and blood with a depravity on a par with Josef Fritzl.

His wife Berta, 85, passed away in 2008. She too was a victim of the former council labourer's sadism, beaten like them with a stick and poked with a pitchfork.
Living hell: Room containing a commode, oil drums, cement sacks and fllth which the women abused for 41 years by their father had to endure

Living hell: Room containing a commode, oil drums, cement sacks and fllth which the women abused for 41 years by their father had to endure

The girls became mentally ill over the years - not a condition they were born with, but a result of the torments they suffered at his hands.

Police say their mother, also beaten into submission, made them promise on her deathbed not to tell anyone about what their father did to them.

Other rooms in the sprawling house near Braunau-am-Inn - the birthplace of Adolf Hitler - were kept spic and span.

But the girls were forced to live in squalor, sleep in the kitchen and use a commode instead of the lavatory in the house.
Horror scene: The house in St. Peter am Hart, Brannau, Austria, where two sisters were subjected to a 41-year sex ordeal by their father

Horror scene: The house in St. Peter am Hart, Brannau, Austria, where the two women were raped repeatedly by their father, who is now 80
Map of Austria locating the village of St Peter am Hart where a newly revealed case long-term incest and imprisonment case has shocked the nation

Forty years of abuse ended in May this year when Gottfried tried to have his way with Christine one more time and she finally snapped.

She hit him with a milk jug on the head. He fell to the floor and cracked his head again.

For two days he was unable to move and police say they hoped he would die.

Finally the women, who were seen from time to time by a social worker - but who were so conditioned by his threats never to expose his vile treatment of them - called her in.

She telephoned for an ambulance for him and the women were taken into care. But still they said nothing.

It was only in June when they opened up to a Red Cross worker about what had happened to them.

It was this volunteer who called in the police.

Austria - still coming to terms with the kidnapping of schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch in the 90s and the Fritzl incest saga - is stunned at another terrible family crime being exposed within its borders.

Gottfried, known as Friedl to neighbours, was an archetypal Austrian father of the old school. He was stern, rigid, master of his house and keeper of the secrets that went inside it.

He controlled all social contact of his daughters with the outside world.

The only time they were seen out together was with him visiting the grave of their mother.

Gottfried has been moved to a prison in nearby Ried while the investigation against him continues; his daughters are undergoing psychiatric therapy in a clinic.

He faces charges of rape, unlawful imprisonment, cruelty, assault and making threats to kill. He was moved from an OAP home where he had been treated since his injuries in May to the jail on Thursday.

 

[ginfreely]

Austrian again!