Father had previous sex crime convictions

AUSTRIAN authorities investigated reports yesterday that ‘house of horrors’ father Josef Fritzl had previous sex crime convictions as public outrage mounted over the incest abuse case.

A police file on Fritzl, 73, who has admitted keeping his daughter as a sex slave in a cramped dungeon for 24 years while she conceived seven of his children, revealed he had a previous sexual assault conviction, a local newspaper reported.

The paper said details of Fritzl’s previous conviction — and another for attempted rape — had turned up in a police file in the Upper Austria archives.

The file allegedly covers Fritzl’s attempted rape of a 21-year-old woman in a forest and the sexual assault on a 24-year-old woman, in the city of Linz in 1967.

Public horror and outrage has triggered widespread debate in Austria on whether sentencing for sex crimes is too lenient.

The revelations triggered calls for tougher sentences for rapists and paedophiles.

There have also been demands for sex convictions to be held on a person’s criminal record for much longer.

Justice Minister Maria Berger, a Social Democrat, insists that current sentencing — “of up to 15 or 20 years, or life if the victim dies” — was draconian enough.

But Interior Minister Guenther Platter, of the conservative OeVP party, called for tougher sentences and for convictions of serious sex crimes never to be wiped out.

Meanwhile, a former tenant in the Fritzl house has told of a string of suspicious occurrences that might have led to the discovery of the dungeon much earlier.

Sepp Leitner lived for four years in a ground floor flat above the cellar in the 1990s, He believes he unwittingly paid for the utility costs for the underground prison. Leitner also told how his dog barked whenever it went past the cellar door. And food mysteriously went missing from his kitchen, probably stolen by Fritzl to feed his captives.