Friends ask how Austrian could have abused captive daughter

Fritzl's confession that he kept his daughter locked in a windowless lair for 24 years, fathering seven of her children, while posing as the head of a happy family has bewildered, angered and estranged former friends.

One of them, a 45-year-old woman from Munich, who would give her name only as Andrea S., said she felt duped and betrayed by Fritzl.

"If I would see him now, I would ask ... 'How can you do such a thing to your children?'" she told AP Television News in an interview Saturday.

That question was also on the minds of classmates of three of the children whom Fritzl fathered with Elisabeth then allegedly smuggled out of the basement and dropped on the doorstep with notes police say he forced his daughter to write saying she couldn't raise them.

"How could the father do such a thing?" asked Jelena Krsic, 12, who goes to school with Elisabeth's 12-year-old son, one of the three being raised by his grandparents.

Jelena, in an interview alongisde her parents, described the boy as a top student who always helped the others when they struggled in mathematics, English or German. She said he once cried in front of the other children when he failed in a jumping exercise, but was otherwise among the best athletes.

When the children returned to school after the scandal broke, "the teachers cried," Jelena said.

"He has a lot of feelings for the others and whenever someone cried, he helped them," Jelena said. "Without him recess is really boring."

Investigators have said that Fritzl was an "absolute ruler" in his household whose tyranny caused most of the seven children he had with his wife to flee the home as soon as they were old enough.