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A GREY family home, dirty walls, high, impenetrable hedges...the first impressions of Austria’s “horror house”, where a father kept his daughter prisoner for 24 years, sexually abusing her and fathering seven children.

Inside, matters are worse – photos released by Austrian police show the true extent of the crime and the human tragedy involved.

Hidden behind a huge, steel-reinforced concrete door in the cellar lies the dungeon where Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, and three of her children had to vegetate for their long years in captivity...without sunlight or hope of escape.

A small door hidden behind a shelf led to the rooms, about 60² metres in total.

The steel door could only be opened by remote control. The code was known only to Josef Fritzl, a retired technician from Amstetten, a town in the province of Lower Austria, and currently the country’s most-hated man.

Via a five-metre corridor, the dungeon warder could enter the barely 1.7-metre high room with cooking and washing facilities where a few children’s drawings and a toy elephant were found.

The dungeon’s sparsely furnished rooms had empty cots decorated with children’s drawings and little stars.

A TV set and videos were their only window to the outside world. But no natural windows let in fresh air or sunlight.

Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five, spent all their lives in those rooms, imprisoned by their father – who was also their grandfather.

They never went to school or played in the garden, like their other three siblings, who were taken from their mother as infants, did.

Josef claimed the “missing” mother had left them at his doorstep.

The 73-year-old Austrian admitted yesterday to having fathered the seven children with his daughter, who was imprisoned in the dungeon.

Fritzl admitted locking Elisabeth in the basement in August 1984 but tried to mitigate the details, a police official was quoted as saying.

Elisabeth had been sexually abused by her father since the age of 11, she said in a statement released by police.

During her captivity, she gave birth to seven children, one of whom died shortly after his birth.

Josef had told authorities that his daughter, whom he reported missing after her “disappearance”, had deposited the infants at his doorstep over the course of several years.

Local authorities stressed that they were not to blame for the tragedy, adding that Josef Fritzl had led a perfect double life and “lied to everyone”.

“If we had had any chance to do something, we would have done it,” district head Hans-Heinz Lenze was quoted as saying.

Authorities expected the results of DNA testing, aimed at verifying the suspicions of incest, later yesterday. First results corroborated Elisabeth’s story.

She and five of her children are being looked after by doctors and therapists.

One daughter, Kerstin, 19, who is believed to suffer from a rare disease, remains in intensive care at the local hospital. Her condition was “critical, but stable”, doctors in Amstetten said.

Meanwhile, another Austrian kidnap victim, Natascha Kampusch, 20, offered help to Elisabeth and the three children.

Kampusch, herself incarcerated in a basement dungeon by her kidnapper for eight years, understands the situation of complete isolation, the former kidnap victim said in a statement released yesterday.

As a result, she wanted to offer Elisabeth financial support from donations she had received from a charity fund, and the opportunity to talk.

Kampusch was abducted by technician Wolfgang Priklopil in 1998 on her way to school. She was eight years old. In August 2006, she escaped her kidnapper, who then committed suicide. — Sapa-DPA