Police check other properties owned by Austrian who imprisoned daughter

Amstetten: Police on Tuesday inspected other properties owned by the man they say confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering her seven children, to ensure he did not hold any other captives in underground cells.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, told The Associated Press that investigators believe it is "more than unlikely" that suspect Josef Fritzl maintained other secret prisons, but police were checking his real estate holdings as a precaution.

Polzer said, "We believe he was so busy with his crime that he wouldn't have time for anything else."

Forensics experts on Tuesday carted boxes of belongings out of the windowless cell Fritzl constructed beneath his apartment in Amstetten, a working-class town 120 kilometres west of Vienna.

Polzer would neither confirm nor deny Austrian media reports that Fritzl, now 73, had past run-ins with the law. "If there was an offence outside of the statute of limitations, I can't comment on this," he said, refusing to elaborate.

Police said Fritzl confessed on Monday to holding captive his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, sexually abusing her, fathering her children and tossing into a furnace the body of one child who died in infancy. He was to appear in court Tuesday.

Investigators say they believe his wife, with whom he had seven other children, was unaware that the daughter she believed ran away to join a religious cult in 1984 was living as a prisoner beneath her feet.

Officials said Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offences under Austrian law.