Vienna - Austrian murderer and rapist Josef Fritzl was moved to a prison ward for mentally abnormal offenders Wednesday, where he is to spend the rest of his life sentence for crimes he committed against his daughter and family in a dungeon under his home. Fritzl, 74, was transferred to the Stein prison in the town of Krems, some 80 kilometres west of Vienna, Austrian press agency APA reported.
The prison, a facility for long-term inmates, was chosen because of its security layout, to protect Fritzl against possible attacks from other inmates.
There were no concrete indications for such a threat, said Karl Drexler, the head of Austria's prison system, "but even those outside know that sex offenders are met with a certain hostility by their fellow inmates."
On March 19, Fritzl was found guilty of having raped and having committed incest with his daughter Elisabeth over a period of 24 years, during which he kept her and some of the seven children he fathered with her in a cellar under his house in the town of Amstetten.
He was also convicted of murder through neglect, as one of the children died shortly after birth in the windowless cellar. Fritzl had failed to get medical help for the baby boy.
All sentences handed out by the jury court, including those for slavery and wrongful imprisonment, run concurrently under Austrian law.
According to the sentence, Fritzl will spend his term in a ward of the large prison which is reserved for criminals who are sane enough to be held accountable for their actions, but which have been found to be mentally abnormal.
In 1984, Fritzl had lured his then 18-year-old daughter into the cellar and, in the years that followed, raped her about 3,000 times.
The case came to light in April 2008, when Elisabeth Fritzl convinced her tormentor to bring her oldest daughter to a hospital to treat a severe illness.
