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Doctors are particularly concerned for the older children kept in the cellar, especially the 19-year-old woman. A doctor treating her said yesterday that it was possible that she would "never get healthy again".

Mr Fritzl, 73, was remanded in custody for 14 days after appearing today before a judge in St Poelten, the provincial capital of Lower Austria.

Investigators who have been painstakingly searching the 60 square metre (645 sq ft) cellar beneath Mr Fritzl's two-storey home, which he built in 1983, today inspected other properties he owned to ensure that he did not have any other captives in underground cells.

In addition to his electrical engineering business, Mr Fritzl also dabbled in property management. He is known to have owned at least one other house in Amstetten, where he spent weekends with his wife and the three adopted children.

Mr Fritzl had planned to tear down the house and erect a block of flats and offices with an underground garage, but his neighbours had taken legal action to prevent the project.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, said today that it was "more than unlikely" that Mr Fritzl maintained other secret prisons, but police had to check as a precaution. "We believe he was so busy with his crime that he wouldn’t have time for anything else," Mr Polzer said.

Authorities have been asking how events in the main family house, in a busy street in the small industrial town of Amstetten, 130 km (80 miles) west of Vienna, passed unnoticed for so long.

Petra Stuiber, a commentator in Austria’s Der Standard newspaper, asked today how what she called a "rich, self-satisfied society" could let such events occur. "How is it possible that nobody heard or saw anything? How can it be that nobody asked questions?" she wrote.

Mr Fritzl kept his daughter and three of her children in a complex which was in some places no more than 1.7 metres (5 ft 6 in) high and contained a rubber-padded cell. Photographs of the cellar show a narrow passageway leading into other rooms that included a cooking area, with children’s drawings on the walls, a sleeping area and a small bathroom with a shower.

The electrical engineer had hidden the entrance to the cell behind shelves and only he knew the code for the concrete door.

Police say that Mr Fritzl’s wife did not know what happened to her daughter when she disappeared in 1984 and was told that she had joined a sect, coming home only to leave three of the children on the doorstep - when in fact she was held in the dungeon beneath the family home.

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