Fritzl feared an attack from cellar children

Josef Fritzl feared his daughter and their two adolescent children he held in a windowless cellar would one day seek revenge and attack him, so he planned to move them to his home upstairs, his psychiatrist said yesterday.

Austria's so-called "Incest Monster" was jailed for life last week after being convicted of murder and of raping his daughter an estimated 3,000 times. Dr Adelheid Kastner, the psychiatrist who compiled a 300-page pre-trial report on Fritzl, said the 73-year-old had planned to move his daughter Elisabeth and her children Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, six, to the home he shared with his wife upstairs.

"Fritzl was afraid that somebody down there might attack him," Dr Kastner told Germany's Stern magazine, "After all, there were three grown-up people living down there towards the end, so it was three against one."