Austria's Hidden Nightmare

"What is really, fundamentally going wrong?" the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard asked today.

That is the question confronting a nation after the discovery that a 73-year-old man held his daughter hostage in a cellar for 24 years and secretly fathered her seven children.

The details of the story are horrific, but more disturbingly for Austrians, it is the third such case uncovered in the last two years.

The country is still coming to terms with what happened to Natascha Kampusch, the teenager who in 2006 escaped from a dungeon she had been kept in for eight years.

Then there was the revelation in February 2007 that three girls had been imprisoned for seven years by their mother in dark, filthy conditions in a house in Linz.

The girls' ordeal started when they were seven, 11 and 13. Their parents divorced and the mother won custody of the children, but had a nervous breakdown. She took them out of school, saying she wanted to teach them at home, but instead kept them hidden in rooms lit by a single light bulb. When finally freed, they could not cope with sunlight.

The girls were isolated for so long that they developed their own language. All they had to play with were mice. Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth were freed in 2005 when the authorities acted on a neighbor's suspicions. Details of the case were concealed until last year to avoid media attention.

It was claimed their mother escaped child welfare visits because she was a lawyer. When their father tried to see the children, his ex-wife told him they were either ill or visiting their grandparents.

Until the latest case, Kampusch's imprisonment at the hands of Wolfgang Priklopil had been regarded as Europe's worst kidnap ordeal.

She was abducted in 1998, aged 10. For the first six months she was kept starved in a homemade dungeon converted from a basement garage.

"I went hungry very often during my imprisonment," she said in a TV interview after her escape. She was forced to called Priklopi her "master".

Later she was allowed to "go upstairs" to read and do household chores. "But I was always sent back down immediately," she said.

Priklopil, a communications technician, had fitted a sophisticated alarm and video cameras in case she tried to get out.She eventually escaped when Priklopil was distracted by a phone call. After she fled, Priklopil killed himself by jumping in front of a Vienna train.

Like the Linz girls, when Kampusch was discovered her skin is said to have been remarkably pale.