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They have all been placed in psychiatric care.

The story began to unravel when the eldest child was rushed unconscious to the hospital for emergency medical care.

Mr F was arrested on Saturday night at the hospital where the teenager has been lying in a coma for over a week.

Prosecutors said he had admitted keeping his daughter below his house but denied that he raped his daughter.

"(He has) admitted the charges of incest, but insisted there was no force involved,” said Gerhard Sedlacek, a spokesman for Austrian prosecutors. “He admitted to fathering seven children by his daughter, one of whom died at an early age.”

Mr F has been transferred to court and is expected to appear before an investigating magistrate this evening.

Police have spent the last two days exploring the network of rooms where they say Elisabeth was first imprisoned on August 28 1984, aged 19, after being drugged and handcuffed by her father. The tiny entrance was concealed in a workshop in a public part of the cellar.

"There was a shelf with plenty of cans and containers, and behind the shelf was a door made of reinforced concrete, secured electronically and running on steel rails, and only the suspect knew the code," said Heinz Lenze, a local police official.

Once inside the dungeon, police reported, they found all the passages extremely narrow, the ceiling is no higher than 5ft 6ins (170cm) and the floors uneven. They have found a makeshift shower room, cooking rings for the secret family to heat food, and a room lined entirely in rubber.

Mr F, a retired engineer who used to work for the construction company Zehnter, was said by police to have been continuously renovating and extending the hidden cellar. Detectives say they have not ruled out finding further secret rooms underneath the sprawling villa.

All seven children were born in the cellar, police say, but within months of their births they were divided between the dark and the light. As babies aged between nine and 15 months, three of them were adopted and raised by their grandparents, leading normal lives - attending school and playing in the swimming pool in the gardens of the villa.

The babies were claimed to have been discovered on the doorstep of the villa between 1993 and 1997. Each baby was left with a note supposedly written by their missing mother Elisabeth, whom the authorities believed had probably joined an extreme and isolated religious sect.

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