Incredulity is driving a judicial and public effort to understand how a man could have entombed his daughter under the noses of residents and authorities, and then kept three of the children he fathered with her underground their entire lives.
Austrian and German media reports have shown pictures and video clips of Fritzl contentedly holidaying without family members in Thailand and Cyprus.
Polzer said the cellar, which was sealed off behind a locked sliding concrete door, included separate sleeping, washing and cooking areas, and was equipped with a refrigerator, freezer and washing machine.
"This electrical equipment would have allowed the occupants of the dungeon to have survived for weeks," he said.
Two of the children who had lived in the cellar have now been reunited with three other siblings who were taken in as infants and raised by Josef and his wife Rosemarie.
"Yesterday we had a small improvised birthday celebration for the 12-year-old, with a birthday cake," Berthold Kepplinger, medical director of the provincial clinic of Lower Austria, told the same news conference..
CHILD IN HOSPITAL
The eldest child, aged 19, remains seriously ill in hospital, where she was taken last week -- the first time she had left the windowless cellar.
Josef Fritzl, who has admitted incarceration and incest, is now in detention and under investigation on suspicion of rape, incest and coercion. He is also being investigated for murder through neglect of a seventh child, which died shortly after birth, and whose remains he burnt in a furnace.
