(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-08 07:40

Police say the retired electrician has admitted that he locked away his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, when she was just 18 and repeatedly raped her, forcing her to bear seven children in all.

Three children spent their entire life underground with their mother, never seeing sunlight, while three were raised by Fritzl and his wife as their "grandchildren" in the family home upstairs. The seventh child died shortly after birth.

The house in Amstetten, where Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, is pictured behind a fence in eastern Austria May 7, 2008. Austria's justice minister said local authorities were gullible in their dealings with Fritzl, who lured his daughter Elisabeth into a basement in 1984, drugging her and locking her up before abusing her for almost a quarter of a century and fathering her seven children. Fritzl claimed his missing daughter had left home to join a sect. The comments from Justice Minister Maria Berger were the first time the government has acknowledged official shortcomings in the handling of the case.[Agencies]

The case has sparked widespread calls for tougher punishment for rapists and paedophiles.

On Wednesday, the government cabinet promptly agreed a package of measures to combat sex crime, which will come into force next year if adopted.

They included keeping criminal records of convicted sex offenders on file for much longer, banning convicted sex criminals from carrying out certain professions, and not allowing them to adopt children.

Under current Austrian law, criminal records are expunged after no longer than 15 years, depending on the severity of the crime.

The Fritzl case has raised questions about the practice after reports suggested the 73-year-old had been convicted of sex crimes back in the 1960s, but those convictions had since been wiped from his record.

When police carried out routine background checks on Fritzl when he reported his daughter missing 24 years ago, his record was technically clean, as it was when he applied to adopt three of the children born out of the abuse.

Under the new proposals, the time period will now be extended to 30 years for sex offenders and serious offences would no longer be wiped at all, Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said.

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