'Face of evil' wrapped in silence

ST POELTEN - Josef Fritzl may have been described as the face of evil but all that was visible yesterday was a single "evil" eye.

It peered through a metal ring in the back of a bright blue folder that masked the face of the accused rapist as he stepped unsteadily across the floor of an Austrian courtroom flanked by burly police guards.

As his trial on charges of multiple rape, murder, incest, coercion and slavery opened in the Lower Austrian capital of St Poelten, Fritzl did his best to hide.

Wearing a houndstooth check jacket, grey shirt and diagonally striped tie, the 73-year-old former engineer trembled as he held the folder pressed to his face for what seemed like a small eternity.

As is the custom in Austria, a reporter from state television was allowed to fire questions at the accused before he took his seat in the dock.

In a bizarre piece of courtroom theatre the journalist repeatedly asked him: "Herr Fritzl can you just answer one thing - why?" But for nearly 10 minutes, Fritzl just stood there shaking behind his folder and said nothing.

When cameramen were ordered to leave the courtroom, the accused sat down in the dock with his back to the public and jurors. They saw an unkempt crop of grizzled grey hair on the back of his head, and his legs nervously twitching as the charges were read out against him. Only the judges could see his face.

The state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, who had inspected the cellar where he kept his family, said: "There is a morbid atmosphere down there. You have to crawl on your knees to get in. The door is only 83cm high. It is damp, mouldy and smelly. The dampness creeps into your back and into your bones. Fritzl raped his daughter down there on the second day of her imprisonment."

The jurors were asked to gain an impression of the stinking atmosphere in the cellar by smelling a number of objects taken from the prison and passed round in a box.

The prosecutor at one point turned to the defendant and asked him directly: "Mr Fritzl, how could you treat your own flesh and blood like that?" Fritzl appeared to flinch when asked the question, but he refused to answer.

His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, insisted that his client was not a monster, even bringing his captives a Christmas tree. "If you just want to have sex, you don't have children," Mayer said. "As a monster, I'd kill all of them downstairs."

- INDEPENDENT, AP