Austria eager to turn the page after shocking incest trial

Austria yesterday was eager to turn the page on the world's most shocking incest case in recent years following Josef Fritzl's conviction and life sentence for murder and rape.

"This is what we had hoped," said Herbert Katzengruber, mayor of the small town of Amstetten, 100 kilometres west of Vienna, where Austria's worst incest case lay hidden for 24 years.

"A dark chapter of our town's history has finally been closed," he noted after the verdict was announced.

Amstetten was overrun by national and foreign media after the story broke last April of Mr Fritzl's 24-year incestuous abuse of his daughter Elisabeth.

During almost a quarter of a century, he had kept her captive in a damp cellar in their apartment building, fathering with her seven children, one of whom died shortly after birth.

For this, he was sentenced on Thursday to life, beginning in a mental facility.

He was also found guilty of incest, rape, sequestration, enslavement and coercion at the end of his four-day trial.

The people of Amstetten now "want to be left in peace," said Mr Katzengruber, after TV cameras and news reporters again besieged the town ahead of what had been dubbed the "trial of the century".

Once the media has left, the town can move on, he added.

"I hope they will leave us alone soon," an elderly woman said as she passed Mr Fritzl's house where journalists were camped out on the day of the verdict.

But others were less optimistic.

"It's not going to be over for a long time. I think it's only just starting. There will be bus tours to Mr Fritzl's house, and we will then all make pilgrimages to Mauer," one Amstetten resident could be overheard commenting.

The Amstetten-Mauer clinic, where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children spent their first months of freedom, was long surrounded by photographers and paparazzi, desperate to get a first picture of the cellar family. Many foreign newspapers painted Austria in a harsh light after the Fritzl cellar case broke, just two years after the story of Natascha Kampusch, who had escaped her kidnapper after eight years locked in a dungeon.

Links were even made to the small alpine state's Nazi past.

Possibly for this reason, Judge Andrea Humer declared at the start of Mr Fritzl's trial on Monday: "He acted alone... We are not prosecuting a town or an entire country."

Sankt Poelten, the regional capital where the trial was held, went all out to ensure it did not suffer the same fate as Amstetten, organising a reception with the mayor and a guided tour of the city for the hundreds of journalists who had come to cover the event.

Court spokesman Franz Cutka even appealed at his last press conference: "Keep good memories of Sankt Poelten."

Meanwhile, the trial was a victory for the young chief prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser, 33, who only took her magistrate's examination in May 2007.

Ms Burkheiser had followed the Fritzl case from the beginning, leading the legal inquiry and questioning the defendant and his victim, and gave a strong performance in the courtroom with colourful rhetoric and powerful imagery.