Fritzl charged with murder

The Austrian man accused of holding his daughter in a home-made dungeon for 24 years and fathering her seven children has been charged with murder.

Officials say Josef Fritzl was responsible for the death of one of the children in infancy.

Prosecutors say experts believe the infant might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for proper medical care.

The 73-year-old retired electrician was also charged today with rape, incest, false imprisonment and slavery.

Fritzl’s trial is expected to begin early in 2009.

His daughter Elisabeth, now 42, and several children were released in April and have been receiving counselling at an undisclosed location.

"Despite recognising the baby's life-threatening situation, he deliberately decided not to intervene'' and get the ailing infant to a doctor, prosecutors said in their 27-page indictment.

Investigators say Fritzl has confessed to imprisoning and repeatedly raping Elisabeth in a warren of windowless cellar rooms he built beneath his home starting in 1984, shortly after she turned 18.

Police say Fritzl told them he threw the body of the infant who died into a furnace in 1996. They say DNA tests have confirmed he is the biological father of the six surviving children.

He is expected to go on trial early next year.

Fritzl took three of the surviving six children upstairs to live otherwise normal lives, and told neighbours that his daughter – who he said had run away to join a religious cult – had left them on the family’s doorstep.

Investigators say three other children remained imprisoned along with their mother until last April, when one of the youths – a teenage girl – became ill and was taken to a hospital.

Fritzl imprisoned his daughter and the children beneath his apartment building in Amstetten, 120 miles west of Vienna.