Sports Calendar

Between 1993 and 2000, Mr F allegedly maintained an elaborate pretence. On three occasions he claimed that the children of his missing daughter had been mysteriously dumped on him and that she had then disappeared. The three accounted for in this way were formally adopted and allowed to attend school. “Their behaviour was good and their marks were too,” a school spokesman said.

The other three, however, were more difficult to explain away – and were condemned to the dungeon.

The case has echoes of the Natascha Kampusch affair in which a Viennese schoolgirl was kept in a cellar from the age of 10 for eight years before escaping.

The case is also likely to fuel a furious debate in Austria about how easy it is to slip through the welfare net. “This is one of the most extraordinary cases in Austrian criminal history,” Colonel Franz Polzer, a police spokesman, said.

But while Ms Kampusch’s captivity was possible because of the anonymity of the suburbs, Ms F and her children were prisoners in a small, close-knit community. Neighbours talked yesterday of how Mr F’s wife used to take her three grandchildren for walks and how Mr F always gave a cheery greeting. “This is terrible,” said a neighbour.

Mr F and his wife, who is said to have been ignorant about the makeshift prison and the years of sexual abuse, called a doctor when Child, 19, fell unconscious in front of their door. Since then she has been in a coma.

When the police called on the household in search of Ms F, Mr F presented a letter supposedly written by his daughter, suggesting that she had left to live with an isolated sect.

Mr F and his daughter were seen in the grounds of the hospital where Child, 19, is being treated. That rare concession by Mr F to his daughter appears to have been his undoing.

There was an eerie silence in this sleepy town yesterday as its 23,000 inhabitants learnt from the television news of the horrors said to have been perpetrated in their midst for almost three decades.

The only sign of life was at Ybbs Street, where a legion of international television crews and news organisations besieged an inconspicuous blue three-storey house, the home of Mr and Mrs F, a retired middle-class couple well known and well respected in the tight-knit community.

As a police spokesman held an impromptu press conference in front of the house, neighbours listened with disbelief to the allegations of how Mr F, a retired electrical engineer, kept his daughter imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon. He adopted three of the children he is alleged to have fathered with her, and they went to school and had a normal life in the apartment upstairs. The other three were allegedly imprisoned two storeys below and, until this weekend, had never seen daylight.

Their window on the outside world was a television set that police said was the only concession Mr F made for his secret family.

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