Austrian anguish over cellar case

Austria's media reacts to another story about horrors in a cellar

Agonising soul-searching has begun in Austria over the discovery that a man held his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children.

""How could it have happened?' journalists ask neighbours and neighbours ask journalists," the Austrian Die Presse newspaper says.

The horrors emerging in Amstetten are the third chilling case involving children in Austria being held captive to be revealed in the last two years.

Austrians are still coming to terms with what happened to Natascha Kampusch, the teenager who, in 2006, escaped from a dungeon in which she had been kept in for eight years.

Serious questions are again being asked of the authorities. David B, on the Kurier newspaper website's talkboards, " says: "I can't understand the authorities.

"Normally, you have to assume the worst when a person is reported missing - above all when both people have a close relationship to each other. Why didn't the authorities examine the house properly?"

Another reader, Richard K, adds: "No one can tell me that nothing came to the attention of the authorities over 24 years ... this case completely stinks."

Petra Stuiber, writing in Austria's Standard, says it is a wider problem for the "very condition of a rich, content society", not just for the authorities.

"How is it possible that no one ever heard or saw anything? How can it be that no one ever asked questions? What does it say about neighbours, relatives and acquaintances, and not least about those people who had anything to do with the family in an official capacity, that the suspect could 'deceive' them all? The whole country must ask itself what is fundamentally going wrong," she says.

Spiegel Online, the international website of the German paper, notes that there were warning signs in the Amstetten case.

"The community of Amstetten, including its population, should drown in shame," the Oesterreich newspaper says in an editorial, according to Reuters. "The neighbours are very thoroughly looking away.".

Until now, "Austrian Syndrome" was used to describe a rare form of meningitis. Now, the Times suggests, the phrase could get a whole new meaning.

Additional reporting by Paul Owen