Dad gives tour of incest cellar

AMSTETTEN, Austria, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The Austrian man who kept his daughter and their children in a cellar says he installed a time-release so they could escape if anything happened to him.

Josef Fritzl, under guard, gave investigators and the judge in his case a tour of the dungeon in his home in Amstetten this week, The Telegraph reported. His daughter, Elisabeth, was confined there for 24 years, subjected to repeated rape by her father and bearing seven children by him.

Fritzl and his wife brought up three of the children upstairs. He claimed that Elisabeth, who had supposedly run away from home, left the infants on the doorstep. A fourth died soon after birth.

Judge Nikolaus Obrovski examined the doors closing off the cellar, especially the last one, which was designed to be an impregnable barrier. The door was hidden in a cupboard and opened by a numerical code entered into a remote control device.

Police have found no sign yet of a time-release mechanism.

"They haven't found all the hidden things he said were there but that doesn't mean they aren't there -- and if they are he needs to show us where they are," a police spokesman said.