A 73-year-old Austrian electrical engineer has confessed to holding his daughter captive in a secret, windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children by her, police said on Monday (April 28). The case, centred on a nondescript two-storey building in the small industrial town of Amstetten, bears chilling similarities to that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch who spent eight years locked up in a basement before escaping in 2006. Some parts of the 60 square metre basement in which the family were kept were no more than 1.70 metres (5 ft 6 in) high and officials said the basement even contained a padded cell. Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, says her father, Josef Fritzl, lured her into the basement of the block in 1984 and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her. Three of her children, aged 19, 18 and five, had been locked up in the basement with her since birth and had never seen sunlight, police said, raising worries about their physical and mental state. The younger two were...