Incest in Austria: a story I didn't want to believe

By Sylvia Westall

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - Elisabeth Fritzl has been locked in a windowless cellar in Austria for roughly the same amount of time I have been alive.

When she escaped, she told police about the 24 years she spent imprisoned beneath the family home during which she had given birth to seven children by her father Josef.

It fell to me to travel to the small north Austrian town of Amstetten to report the story. I doubted it was true.

The grey concrete building beneath which 73-year-old Fritzl hid his abuses was 10 minutes' walk from the central town square paved in light stone and decked with flowers, its drab facade on a busy main road heading out of town towards rich green hills.

Further down the road from the block, children played in a large open garden and adults basked on deckchairs in the sun.

It was the back of the building on Ybbsstrasse that everyone wanted to see. "Down there. It's a bloody circus," a cameraman directed me, pointing down a smart residential street lined with small houses in pink, cream and white.

A helicopter thudding overhead, I walked down the road crammed with TV satellite vans and swarming with journalists, black cables and dazed residents peering over garden fences.

I expected residents to be embarrassed to talk to me. But everyone wanted to talk. All the time. Spying my notebook, people even came up to me when I was queuing for the toilet or kneeling on the pavement scrabbling in my bag.