Fritzl 'may have been in the area of murder'

Police in Austria are examining links between the murder of a young woman and the man who has confessed to holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children.

The body of Martina Posch was discovered 22 years ago near a lake where Josef Fritzl owned property.

Martina, who was 17, had vanished 10 days earlier.

Her corpse was found on the shore of Mondsee lake near Salzburg.

She was believed to have been raped.

Alois Lissl, chief of police of Upper Austria province, said that although no evidence had surfaced so far, police have widened their investigation into the unsolved murder 22 years ago to include Fritzl because he could have been in the area at the 'time and place' of the killing.

“We have found no sign” of a concrete link up to now, Mr Lissl said.

But he added Fritzl would be asked for an alibi because the property owned by his wife could mean he was in the area when Posch was killed.

“We are looking at the case from a third angle,” he said.

Fritzl has admitted keeping his daughter Elisabeth in a secret dungeon underneath his home in the town of Amstetten where she had the seven children by him.

Hospital personnel in Lower Austria, meanwhile, fought to save the life of Elisabeth’s 19-year-old daughter Kerstin whose emergency admission to hospital triggered the discovery that her family had been imprisoned and terrorised for decades.

Her condition was critical but stable.

She is the eldest of the seven children Fritzl fathered with his daughter.

Kerstin, who is in an induced coma, is undergoing dialysis because of the effects of lack of oxygen. She was brought to the hospital unconscious and later suffered seizures.

The fate of her family came to light after doctors, mystified by her ailment, publicly appealed for her mother to come forward because they needed her medical history.

Authorities were providing little information about Fritzl, 73, who they say has confessed to locking up Elisabeth since she was 18 and repeatedly raping her. He said he incinerated the body of one of her children, who died in infancy.

Leopold Etz, chief of homicide for Lower Austria province, said authorities were confident that Fritzl acted alone.

“I think we can rule out accomplices,” he said.

He said DNA tests confirmed that no other man entered the soundproof cellar rooms Fritzl made into a prison below his home.

Fritzl let his wife Rosemarie believe that Elisabeth had run away to join a religious cult when she disappeared, and authorities say there was no evidence she knew what was going on.