Ex-tenant Josef Leitner, who lived in the flat above the bunker where
Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned for 24 years,  says he is shocked to hear he
had lived above such a prison, and that he hadn't seen any signs. Leitner says
he knew a person who said Elisabeth had told him that she had been abused by
her father.

AMSTETTEN, AUSTRIA (MAY 02, 2008)ATV - 

Josef Leitner, who lived in the flat directly above the bunker where
Elisabeth was kept, says that the cover-up organised by her father, Josef
Fritzl had been perfect. He had no idea of the horror beneath his flat he
said, they had even held parties and celebrations over the heads of the
victims.
    Leitner lived in the flat between 1990 and 1994 and said Fritzl had
been strict that no-one was allowed access into the cellar. While he says he
never heard any noises, in retrospect he believes his dog might have felt
something.
    "My dog sometimes used to get upset during the night, or when it
was going past the entrance to the cellar or to the garden, then it used to
get nervous. My brother also noticed and mentioned it to me. In the night the
dog would sometimes jump up and bark or growl, I think he felt something, dogs
are more sensitive of course," he said.
    Leitner says that Fritzl had been bad tempered with him at times, and
that he had often come into the house in the night carrying large bags, but he
had never thought anything about it. The only thing Leitner had considered
unusual was the large electricity bill for such a small flat. In the meantime
Fritzl had revoked his tenancy because of Leitner's dog which wasn't allowed
under the rules, and because the dog was often noisy.
    The newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten has meanwhile reproduced
what it said was a 1967 court record from state archives in the city of Linz,
in which a Josef F. was accused of breaking into the apartment of a
24-year-old nurse and raping her. 
    Austrian officials will say only that, if Fritzl had such a rape
conviction, it would have been purged from the records after 15 years at the
latest. The reported conviction dates from shortly after the birth of Fritzl's
daughter Elisabeth, now 42, who was released just over a week ago from the
cellar where he had fathered seven children with her. 
    Leitner said he a female childhood friend of Elisabeth said she had run
away together to Linz with her and told her that she'd had been raped by her
father.
    "I heard from a friend who had disappeared to Linz with Elisabeth,
but they were brought back by the police, and this really upset me, that she
(Elisabeth) had been raped by her father as a child and had wanted to leave
again. But she hadn't managed it," he said.
    Despite Elisabeth had run away from home as a child, authorities said
officials followed correct procedures in allowing Fritzl and his wife
Rosemarie - who had seven grown-up children of their own -  to care for three
of the children he had with his daughter, ostensibly after she abandoned them
on their doorstep. 
    "This friend of Elisabeth's said that at the time they had thought
that her leaving the children on the doorstep was an act of revenge for when
he had raped her," Leitner said.
    Elisabeth was kept imprisoned in a cellar complex beneath the grey
apartment block with her three other surviving children -- a daughter, now 19,
and two sons aged 18 and 5. Until last weekend, the children had never seen
sunlight.