An elderly man has been arrested on suspicion of raping his wife and two daughters for 40 years while keeping them prisoner in their home.
In a case with chilling echoes of the crimes of Josef Fritzl, the man is said to have started his assaults in 1970 when one of his daughters was 12 and the other four.
His wife died in 2008, but the alleged beatings, rape and torture of his daughters went on until May this year when the older of the two decided to fight back despite being warned that they would be killed if they resisted.
She has told police she struck her 80-year-old father while he was trying to rape her and he fell so heavily that he was injured and couldn’t get up.
For two days they ignored his pleas for help, but eventually called the local authority who sent a social worker to the house.
The man was taken to a care home for treatment and has been arrested after his daughters, now aged 53 and 45, finally broke their silence and told police of their ordeal which unfolded in the community of St Peter am Hart in Upper Austria, near the town of Braunau where Adolf Hitler was born.
The 2,400 residents were said by the mayor to be ‘very shocked’ at what had emerged.
It is unclear whether the man, identified only as Gottfried Wagner, ever made his daughters – both of whom are said to have slight mental handicaps –pregnant.
But police say they lived in fear, were treated as slaves and forced to sleep on a large wooden shelf in the kitchen to which they were confined even though the rambling property had many rooms.
He beat them with sticks and thrust at them with a pitchfork when they displeased him.
Police said he forbade them virtually all social contact with the outside world and rarely let them out of his sight.
He was in possession of two weapons, thought to be shotguns, and routinely threatened to kill his daughters if they tried to escape.
The man has denied the accusations. But the case is yet another embarrassment for Austria and its seeming inability to detect terrible abuse.
In 2006 a young girl called Natascha Kampusch, kidnapped eight and-a-half years earlier by a maniac called Wolfgang Priklopil, finally escaped his cellar lair near Vienna.
He killed himself shortly afterwards. Then in 2008 the world was horrified at the Fritzl case when it emerged he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth when she was 18 in a secret cellar beneath the family home in Amstetten where he raped her repeatedly over 24 years.
She bore him seven children in the dungeon darkness, six of whom survive and live with her.
Fritzl is now incarcerated in Austria’s most secure jail for psychiatric prisoners.
Austrian man Gottfried 'Fritzl' Wagner locks up, rapes 2 daughters for 41years - What's On Tianjin