DNA Results Prove Austrian Man Fathered His Daughter's Children

An Austrian man who confessed to locking his daughter in a basement cell for 24 years and fathering her seven children was set to make a court appearance Tuesday as the now 42-year-old woman was reunited with her mother.

Josef Fritzl appeared before a district magistrate Monday evening and was referred to a higher court in St. Poelten, the capital of the province of Lower Austria.

Prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek said Fritzl was "completely calm, completely without emotion" when he was placed in pretrial detention Tuesday. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, said her father first lured her into the windowless cellar that became her prison cell in the town of Amstetten, northeast of Vienna, in 1984. She endured repeated sexual assaults and gave birth to seven children in the tiny, cramped basement rooms. One of the infants died shortly after it was born, and Josef Fritzl has admitted he burned the body.

Three of the children born in the basement were raised by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, who remained unaware of the horrors taking place in her home, police said..

Fritzl had told his wife that Elisabeth had run away from home at age 18 to join a religious cult and had sent three of her children to be raised by her parents.

DNA test results released Tuesday confirmed that Fritzl is the biological father of the children born while his daughter was in captivity.

None of the three had ever been outside of the tiny, cramped room where they were born. Hill told CBC News that one of the boys had seen the moon for the first time when he was taken from his home by police.

Hospital officials said two of the three children who had grown up in the basement cell met their siblings, who were raised by their grandparents, on Sunday. The other child raised in captivity has been hospitalized due to an illness.