Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who plays a Muslim mistaken for a terrorist in his latest film, says he was racially profiled at Newark Airport and detained for two hours on Friday. The 43-year-old "Tom Cruise of India" - cited last year by Newsweek as one of the world's 50 most influential men - was released only after Indian diplomats intervened. "I was really being hassled, perhaps because of my name being Khan," the international box office sensation charged Saturday in a text message to reporters. "These guys wouldn't let me through." Khan, who has appeared in more than 70 films, said he was waiting for his luggage Friday when his name popped up on a computer alert list. Security then pulled him aside. "Absolutely uncalled for, I think," Khan said. "I felt angry and humiliated." Khan said he endured two hours of interrogation before he was allowed to call the Indian embassy in Washington. An official there vouched for the star, who was then released. "I was really taken aback," Khan told an Indian television station. "I did not want to say anything just in case they took everything wrong, because I am a little worried about Americans because they do have this issue when your name is Muslim." Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not answer multiple inquiries Saturday about the case. The actor insisted he had all the proper paperwork when he was brought to a detention room at the New Jersey airport. But, he said, Khan "is a Muslim name, and I think the name is common on their checklist." New Dehli-based U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer said officials were trying to "ascertain the facts of the case." "Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States," Roemer said Saturday. "Many Americans love his films." But there were no Bollywood buffs in Newark as Khan came through the airport on his way to Chicago for a celebration of India's independence day. "I told them I am a movie star," Khan said - although the line fell on deaf ears. He recently signed a deal with Fox Star Studios to finance and distribute his new movie, "My Name is Khan" - the story of a Muslim man mistaken for a terrorist in post-9/11 America. The incident caused outrage in his homeland, where the Khan-troversy dominated television news. Last month, Continental Airlines apologized to former Indian President Abdul Kalam for frisking him at New Delhi's airport.

A Saudi Arabian princess who had an illegitimate child with a British man has secretly been granted asylum in this country after she claimed she would face the death penalty if she were forced to return home. The young woman, who has been granted anonymity by the courts, won her claim for refugee status after telling a judge that her adulterous affair made her liable to death by stoning.
Her case is one of a small number of claims for asylum brought by citizens of Saudi Arabia which are not openly acknowledged by either government. British diplomats believe that to do so would in effect be to highlight the persecution of women in Saudi Arabia, which would be viewed as open criticism of the House of Saud and lead to embarrassing publicity for both governments.
The woman, who comes from a very wealthy Saudi family, says she met her English boyfriend – who is not a Muslim – during a visit to London. They struck up a relationship
She became pregnant the following year and worried that her elderly husband – a member of the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia – had become suspicious of her behaviour, she persuaded him to let her visit the UK again to give birth in secret. She feared for her life if she returned to Saudi Arabia.
She persuaded the court that if she returned to the Gulf state she and her child would be subject to capital punishment under Sharia law – specifically flogging and stoning to death. She was also worried about the possibility of an honour killing.
Since she fled Saudi Arabia, her family and her husband's family have broken off contact with her.
The woman has been granted permanent leave to remain in the UK after the Immigration and Asylum tribunal allowed her appeal.
The Home Office yesterday declined to discuss the case. A spokesman for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in London said that he would call back but subsequently became unavailable.
Relations between the UK and Saudi Arabia have been strained in recent years and were brought to a head in 2006 when Tony Blair intervened to end a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) inquiry into alleged kickbacks paid in a multibillion military aircraft deal between the two states.
The Saudi royal family was deeply concerned about the idea that the investigators might try o open up their Swiss bank accounts, it was alleged at the time.
This led the Saudis to threaten to restrict the sharing of intelligence relating to terror activity if the prosecution went ahead. They also threatened to pull out of other highly-lucrative arms deals.
Last year, the House of Lords ruled that the SFO's decision to drop the corruption investigation into the £43bn Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems was unlawful.
In a hard-hitting ruling, two High Court judges described the SFO's decision as "an outrage".
One of them, Lord Justice Moses, said the SFO and the Government had given into "blatant threats" that Saudi intelligence co-operation would end unless the probe into corruption was halted.
"No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice," he said. "It is the failure of government and the defendant to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court."
The Middle East state has been shrouded in controversy over oppressive policies against women and homosexuals. Secrecy surrounds much of the Saudi legal system, but in a recent report on the use of the death penalty in the kingdom, the human rights group Amnesty International highlighted its extensive use against men and women.
Adulterers face public stonings and floggings and, in the most serious cases, beheadings and hangings.
The high numbers of executions in Saudi Arabia in 2007 continued into 2008. There were at least 102 executions of men and women last year – at an average rate of two every week. Amnesty is aware of at least 136 individuals currently awaiting execution.
Last week, Saudi Arabia's religious police were blamed for the death of two sisters who were murdered in what was deemed an "honour killing" by their brother, after the sisters were arrested for allegedly mixing with men to whom they were not related.
The Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia said that the religious police had arrested the two sisters, aged 19 and 21, thus putting their lives in danger.
Their brother shot them dead in front of their father when they left a women's shelter in Riyadh on 5 July, according to Saudi news reports.
In 2007, in a case that shocked Saudis, a woman from Qatif was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after being gang-raped. She offended cultural expectations because she was unaccompanied when she got into a car with a former boyfriend.
The man had agreed to hand back a photograph of the woman who was about to marry another man, but as they drove along a street they were stopped and seized by seven men who raped them both. The woman was originally sentenced to 90 lashes but the sentence was increased when she appealed. Eventually, after an international outcry, she was pardoned.
In 2007, King Abdullah II of Saudi Arabia was jeered during a state visit to Britain as dozens of demonstrators turned out to protest at his country's human rights record.
src: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/princess-facing-saudi-death-penalty-given-secret-uk-asylum-1753007.html

Why did Bernie Madoff get 150 years in prison? Short answer -- he's a sleaze. Real answer -- lots of reasons.
The Ponzi Scheme operator's conviction yesterday produced the sort of unrestrained glee that was entirely to be expected. Madoff, who is certifiably old, obviously won't see the light of day following a 150-year prison term.
Lee Sorkin, Madoff's attorney, called the sentence "absurd" this morning during an interview with Matt Lauer on "Today": "The justice system is not built on vengeance. It's not built on symbolism."
He continued: "This fraud was collapsing for a number of years before he confessed. He could have very easily gotten on an airplane, wired his money out of the United States. He did not choose to do that."
Nice guy, that Madoff. Here's video of the interview:

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai coroners completed an autopsy on Friday on the body of actor David Carradine, a day after the star of the U.S. television show "Kung Fu" was found naked and hanging dead in his luxury Bangkok hotel room.
Coroners at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn hospital said they had not yet determined the cause of the 72-year-old's death and were waiting for the results of a toxicology screen.
"We are now running tests and then we will decide the cause of death," the hospital's chief coroner, Nantana Sirisap, told Reuters.
"This certainly was not a natural cause of death," she said.
A maid found Carradine hanging naked by a rope in the closet of his hotel suite at the plush Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel on Thursday, police said.
They said there was no indication other people had been in the room, where Carradine had stayed during the shooting of a film called "Stretch."
A U.S. embassy official in Bangkok said he had no details of the police investigation.
Carradine, from a family of performers and the eldest son of character actor John Carradine, enjoyed a long career on Broadway, television and in movies such as director Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" and "Kill Bill: Vol. 2."
While some media reports speculated his death may have been a suicide, a spokeswoman said neither they nor his family believed Carradine was capable of killing himself.
FAMILY SHOCKED
"His family is in shock," said Tiffany Smith of Carradine's management firm, Binder & Associates. "They have the same belief we have. There was no way David did this to himself."
Carradine wrote in his 1995 autobiography "Endless Highway" that he had tried to kill himself when he was 5 years old. The book also documented his alcoholism and extensive use of drugs, from LSD to cocaine.
He worked on Broadway in "The Deputy" and "The Royal Hunt of the Sun" and made his mark on Hollywood in the 1960s in TV westerns such as "Wagon Train," "The Virginian" and a TV version of the hit western movie "Shane."
He was made most famous by his role in the U.S. series "Kung Fu" where he played Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Asian martial arts specialist, which earned him an Emmy nomination.
The role of Caine led to parts in more than 200 productions and his turn as the villainous Bill in Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" led to his fourth Golden Globe nomination.
Carradine was married five times and had two daughters from previous marriages.
src:reuters

An Egyptian cut off his own penis on Sunday in protest at his parents' choice of bride, a police official said.The 25-year-old laborer from the village of Sheikh Eissa in southern Egypt was taken to hospital in stable condition, the official said, adding that the man had also mutilated his testicles."He was in love with a woman but his parents rejected her and told him to marry another woman he didn't want. He took a knife and cut off his penis in his room."Doctors were unable to reattach the severed member, the official said.

Armando Lucero, who was placed in a maximum security prison on May 11 for "aggravated and repeated sexual abuse", is said to have raped the three girls from early childhood.
The tragic drama unfolded in the city of Mendoza, about 620 miles west of Buenos Aires
Officials are now waiting for the results of psychological exams of Lucero, who has come to be known as the "Monster of Mendoza" in a case chillingly similar to the Austrian incest scandal that shocked the world last year.
In that case, Josef Fritzl, 73, was sentenced in March to life in prison for imprisoning his daughter in a secret dungeon for 24 years, and for the death of one of the seven children he had with her.
Lucero faces a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison. The woman at the center of the drama, now 35, fled her family home to obtain protection from the local authorities.
She told investigators that she had been sexually abused repeatedly over a period of 20 years, during which time she bore her father seven children.
The woman decided to break her silence, she said, because her father threatened to sexually abuse one of her daughters.
Lucero, who is unemployed, lived in his home with his daughter and their children, as well as his second wife and his stepmother.
His civil record shows he had seven children by his wife and eight more children from a previous marriage. Counting his liaison with his daughter, he would have fathered 22 children.
The seven children he has fathered with his daughter are now between the ages of two and 19.
Another one of Lucero's daughters, aged 40, has said she was raped by her father from the age of eight.

A Cairo court on Thursday sentenced an Egyptian tycoon and a former policeman to death for the murder of Lebanese pop diva Suzanne Tamim in Dubai last year.
The judge ordered Hisham Talaat Mustafa and retired policeman Mohsen al-Sukkari hanged for respectively ordering and carrying out the brutal slaying of the singer in a luxury Dubai apartment in July.
“Untill now I still believe that Talaat Mustafa is innocent. The evidence we have is strong and the ruling of the court is severe,” lawyer Samir al-Shishtawi, claimant of civil rigths, told Al Arabiya. “We are going to take the case to the appeals court and we are confident the ruling will be overturned.”
Mustafa, former chairman of the Talaat Moustafa Group and a prominent politician, had been accused of paying security man Sukkari $2 million to stab Tamim to death at her luxury Dubai house in the United Arab Emirates on July 28. Samir al-ShishtawiThe indictment had accused Sukkari of killing Tamim after tricking her into opening the door of her apartment by posing as a representative of the building owners. He then attacked her with a knife.
It accused Mustafa of participating in the crime through "incitement, agreement and assistance" in the killing of his former lover.
The evidence included tape recordings of telephone calls between Mustafa and Sukkari, security video footage from the apartment and DNA from the bloodied clothes that Sukkari was accused of leaving close to the scene of the crime.
But defense lawyer Atef Manaawi raised questions during the trial about the clothes the prosecutor said the accused was wearing when he committed the crime. He also cast doubt on the weapon used to commit the murder as well as the autopsy of the victim’s body.
The lawyer of the victim said: “We accept the court’s ruling and we respect the law.”
Sukkari’s files were referred to Egyptian religious authorities for review, as normal in capital cases in Egypt.
The arrest of Mustafa in September, after weeks of speculation about the case, hit Talaat Mustafa shares. They closed on Wednesday at 5 Egyptian pounds ($0.89) per share, off a year low of 2.52 pounds hit in March.
Mustafa, who was born in 1959, gave up the chairmanship of the Talaat Mustafa Group to his brother Tarek. Tamim, who died at the age of 30, rose to fame after winning the top prize in a television show in 1996.

Five years ago, a shotgun blast left a ghastly hole where the middle of her face had been. Five months ago, she received a new face from a dead woman.

Connie Culp stepped forward Tuesday to show off the results of the nation's first face transplant, and her new look was a far cry from the puckered, noseless sight that made children run away in horror.

Culp's expressions are still a bit wooden, but she can talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Her speech is at times a little tough to understand. Her face is bloated and squarish, and her skin droops in big folds that doctors plan to pare away as her circulation improves and her nerves grow, animating her new muscles.
But Culp had nothing but praise for those who made her new face possible.
"I guess I'm the one you came to see today," the 46-year-old Ohio woman said at a news conference at the Cleveland Clinic, where the groundbreaking operation was performed. But "I think it's more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person's face."
Up until Tuesday, Culp's identity and how she came to be disfigured were a secret.
Culp's husband, Thomas, shot her in 2004, then turned the gun on himself. He went to prison for seven years. His wife was left clinging to life. The blast shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye. Hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face. She needed a tube into her windpipe to breathe. Only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were left.
A plastic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Risal Djohan, got a look at her injuries two months later. "He told me he didn't think, he wasn't sure, if he could fix me, but he'd try," Culp recalled.
She endured 30 operations to try to fix her face. Doctors took parts of her ribs to make cheekbones and fashioned an upper jaw from one of her leg bones. She had countless skin grafts from her thighs. Still, she was left unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.
Then, on Dec. 10, in a 22-hour operation, Dr. Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who replaced 80 percent of Culp's face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive.
"Here I am, five years later. He did what he said — I got me my nose," Culp said of Djohan, laughing.
In January, she was able to eat pizza, chicken and hamburgers for the first time in years. She loves to have cookies with a cup of coffee, Siemionow said.

src:nydailynews.com

Burglars stole a laptop containing photos of Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, a digital camera and video material from the home of Julien Enthoven, the brother of the first lady's former lover, Raphael.
The photos reportedly show her and Raphael with their nine-year-old son, Aurélien, while others show the pair at family occasions
The intruders broke into the flat in rue Dauphine, in Paris' chic 6th arrondissement, via a window.
This is the third time this year that those linked to President Nicolas Sarkozy have been burgled in Paris.
In February the home of the Mr Sarkozy's brother, François was raided, and a week earlier half-a-million pounds worth of designer jewellery was taken from the apartment of Cecilia Attias, the President's second wife.
But police said that they did not believe the robbers had any idea about the contents of their booty.
"It was a banal burglary. Everything that was digital was stolen as is often the case," said a spokesman.
The then Miss Bruni met Raphael, a philosopher who was married at the time, while going out with his father, Jean-Paul Enthoven in 2001.
But they separated six years later, with Raphael complaining that she was not sufficiently committed. His ex-wife, Justine Levy – the daughter of Bernard-Henri Levy, the media philosopher – later wrote a revenge novel about a former supermodel who seduces another women's husband. The character is described as a "praying mantis" and a "leech of a woman with a Terminator smile".
Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy's ex-lovers include British rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, as well as Donald Trump, the US tycoon, and a number of other public figures.
A nude picture taken during her supermodel days, was released on the eve of a state visit to Britain last year. Since then, she has sought to portray a more demure image. It is not thought any of the stolen photos were compromising.
Their theft occurred on the night before the presidential couple arrived in Spain, where Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy has hit the headlines as a fashion rival to Princess Letizia.
src:telegraph.co.uk

A woman left covered in bruises after apparently being slapped in the face by a police sergeant at the vigil of Ian Tomlinson says she is shocked by the incident.
The Metropolitan police last night suspended the sergeant involved, a member of the Territorial Support Group. He had concealed his badge number before lashing out at the woman with his baton at the memorial protest on 2 April, the day after newspaper seller Tomlinson collapsed and died after apparently being assaulted by police.
The woman, Nicky, who is from Brighton, said: "I'm shocked at the way the police treated me."
She also expressed thanks to Tristan Woodwards, the 25-year-old IT assistant who filmed the incident and passed his evidence to the Guardian after uploading it onto Youtube. "I just want to thank the guy who took that video," she said.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission announced it would investigate the alleged attack, although the woman has said she has yet to make a formal complaint.
However, after returning from the vigil at the Bank of England, her family took photographs of her injuries and she is believed to have a medical report.
The footage and series of photographs appear to show the sergeant hitting Nicky across the face with the back of his hand, and saying: "Go away."
Nicky, clutching a carton of orange juice and digital camera, remonstrates with the officer and can be heard swearing. The sergeant is then seen drawing a baton from his pocket and striking her on her legs.
The footage is not clear, but Nicky appears to fall to the ground. The crowd erupts angrily with chants of "shame on you".
Her sister, Natalie Thomson, said: "We've been watching the news and it has turned into such a big story now. I was shocked when all the bruising came up. She was struck at least twice with his baton. She went there as a peaceful protester. She has no criminal record and she has been assaulted."

A Palestinian woman died after her father buried her alive claiming he wanted to preserve the "family honor." The father, in his seventies, turned himself in and admitted to killing his 24-year-old divorced daughter.

After investigating the crime scene, the police discovered that the woman’s father had tied her arms and legs and muzzled her before burying her alive. According to press reports on Monday, the coroner was to examine the body to determine whether the woman was also beaten before her death.

The police also detained four of the victim's brothers to investigate their involvement in the crime.

A Russian Aeroflot Boeing 737-500 airliner crashed near the Ural Mountains on Sunday, killing all 88 passengers and crew on board -- 21 of them foreign nationals."The Boeing-737 carried 82 passengers on board, including seven children, and six crew... All passengers were killed," Aeroflot said in a statement."There are foreign citizens among the victims, including nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine, and one each from France, Switzerland, Latvia, the United States, Germany, Turkey and Italy," the statement said.Debris from the crash covered a section of Russia's main east-west railway, forcing its closure, Russian media reported.

Television pictures showed firefighters walking round the smoldering, shattered remains of the plane.Investigators were flying from Moscow to try and establish what caused the crash but there was no suggestion of an attack or sabotage."It was burning while still in the sky and it looked like a falling comet," a female eyewitness told Russia's Vesti-24 television channel."As the plane was coming in for landing, it lost communication at the height of 1,100 meters (yards) and air controllers lost its blip. The airplane was found within Perm's city limits completely destroyed and on fire," the Aeroflot statement said.Earlier, investigator Vladimir Markin was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying that the airplane "fell into a ravine near the city limits."Aeroflot set up a crisis center for the victims' relatives both in Moscow's Sheremetyevo-1 airport and in Perm, including psychological aid, the company said.Last year, 33 Russian aviation accidents left 318 dead -- a sixfold increase over 2005 -- raising serious concerns about Russia's civil aviation, with experts pointing to major faults in the professional training of crews as well as Russia's ageing fleet of passenger jets.An air safety commission announced in January that the average age of the country's international airliners was 18, and its regional jets 30 years.

A series of synchronized bomb blasts rocked New Delhi on Saturday, killing at least 18 people and injuring dozens more in some of the busiest market areas of the Indian capital. Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said five bombs had gone off, and Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil put the death toll at 18, with many more injured. A Muslim militant outfit, Indian Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the bombings in an e-mail. The group has claimed recent bomb attacks in other Indian cities.

The five blasts of varying intensity included two at Connaught Place -- the city's largest financial and commercial centre -- and two more at the busy, upmarket shopping district of Greater Kailash. India's television network NDTV quoted the e-mail as saying, "In the name of Allah, the Indian Mujahideen has struck back again. Do whatever you want. Stop us if you can."Police in Greater Kailash searched for survivors among a mess of mangled motorcycles and shattered glass from vehicles caught in two blasts that went off within seven minutes of each other.President Pratibha Patil denounced what she described as a "mindless act of violence."Police said two unexploded bombs had been found in Connaught Place -- one in a cinema -- and a third near India Gate, one of the country's most iconic landmarks.Both locations are popular with international tourists. An explosive expert with one of the bomb disposal units said the devices appeared to have been packed with steel ball bearings and nuts and bolts "to cause maximum harm."Triple blasts in New Delhi in October 2005, blamed on Pakistan-backed Islamic rebel groups, claimed nearly 70 lives, while a 2001 attack on India's national parliament complex also blamed on Muslim militants killed 14 people.The Indian Mujahideen group had claimed responsibility for a wave of bombings in July that killed at least 45 people in the western commercial city of Ahmedabad

A 73-year-old Austrian man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children, police said.
A 42-year-old woman had told police on Sunday that her father, Josef Fritzl, lured her into the basement of the block where they lived in the town of Amstetten in 1984 and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
"(Fritzl) has now said that he locked up his daughter for 24 years and that he alone fathered her seven children and that he locked them up in the cellar," Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria told Reuters by telephone.
Three of Elisabeth Fritzl's children had been locked up since birth in the basement of the plain, grey building along with their mother and had never seen sunlight or received any education, police said.
Austrian investigators were combing through the network of windowless, underground cells where Elisabeth and the children had been holed up.
Some parts of the dungeon were no more than 1.70 metres high and officials in Amstetten said the basement labyrinth even contained a padded cell.
The case unfolded when a 19-year-old girl - the oldest of the three - became seriously ill and was hospitalised, prompting doctors to appeal for the girl's mother to come forward to provide more details about her medical history.
Fritzl then brought Elisabeth and her remaining two children out of the basement, telling his wife - who thought their "missing" daughter had chosen to return home, police said.
Elisabeth agreed to make a "comprehensive statement" detailing her ordeal to the police after receiving assurances she would have no further contact with her father, who she said abused her from the age of 11.
Newspaper headlines called the case the "crime of a monster" and the "worst crime of all time".
Media asked how authorities and residents of Amstetten, 130 kilometres west of Vienna, could have failed to notice what was happening in the "horror house".
The case was especially shocking because it was reminiscent of that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch who spent eight years locked up in a windowless cell before escaping in August 2006.
"The community of Amstetten should drown in shame ... The neighbours are turning a blind eye," the Oesterreich newspaper wrote in an editorial.
The daily Der Standard wrote: "The whole country must ask itself what is really, fundamentally going wrong."
Web of lies
Police have said they believe Josef's wife Rosemarie had been unaware of what happened to her daughter when she disappeared in 1984 and it was assumed Elisabeth had left voluntarily when her parents received a letter from her saying they should not search for her.
But all the while Elisabeth was being held in what Polzer described as a sophisticated network of chambers with facilities for sleeping, cooking and washing.
Elisabeth gave birth to seven children, one of whom died shortly after being born, police said.
Three of the children - two girls and one boy - were brought up by Josef and his wife after they were left on the doorstep where the couple lived. The first child was accompanied by a note from Elisabeth saying she was unable to care for the baby herself.
Three others - two boys and a girl -, including the two eldest aged 18 and 19, and the youngest, aged 5, had been locked up in the basement with their mother since birth.
-Reuters

VIENNA (AFP) — Austrian police on Sunday arrested a 73-year-old man accused of locking up his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her.
A prosecution spokesman said Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, had accused her father, Josef, of "massive crimes". DNA tests are being conducted on the woman and six surviving children.
It is the third time in recent years that Austria has been stunned by tales of children locked away by parents or adults they know.
According to police, Elisabeth Fritzl told investigators her father put her to sleep with an anaesthetic on August 28, 1984, handcuffing her in a locked basement.
Officially, she was declared a missing person, with Interpol opening an investigation.
A letter was sent to her parents asking that they stop searching for her and local authorities concluded she had been seized by a religious sect.
She told police that she spent years imprisoned in an underground chamber beneath the family home near the eastern town of Amstetten.
Elisabeth Fritzl told detectives she was "regularly abused" by her father and their incestuous relationship produced seven children.
All the children appear to have been born in grim captivity but investigators said one child, a twin, died shortly after birth. Police said the body was subsequently burned.
Three boys and three girls, now aged between five and 20, survived. Josef Fritzl legally adopted two boys and one girl.
Josef Fritzl is said to have told his wife, Rosemarie, and local authorities that three babies had been left by Elisabeth on their doorstep, in different years.
Each delivery was accompanied by a letter purportedly signed by Elisabeth Fritzl saying she could not support the child because she already had others to care for.
The trio went to school as normal, seemingly unaware that their mother and three other siblings (a girl of 19, and boys at 18 and five) were trapped underground.
According to ORF national television, the mother and five children are now in hospital. All are being treated by a team of psychologists. Reports said the mother was physically frail and badly disturbed by her ordeal.
Authorities were worried about the health of the mother and three of her children.
Yet neither neighbours nor social services appear to have had the slightest inkling. "They had a swimming pool in the garden, we would hear them laughing the three of them," said one neighbour.
Another backed up the story of the babies on the doorstep, adding: "(Rosemarie) always looked after the kids so well, taking them to school. We said 'it's incredible what she manages to do at her age'."
Police said the case only came to light after one of the girls, 19-year-old Kerstin, was admitted to hospital in a critical condition in mid-April.
Doctors stepped up efforts to find the mother, looking for background medical information, and Josef Fritzl brought his secret offspring into the family home.
He is said to have told his wife they suddenly re-appeared. Elisabeth Fritzl told investigators her mother knew nothing about the sexual abuse she had endured since the age of 11, some seven years before she was locked away.
Authorities found Elisabeth Fritzl and the three underground children on Saturday evening.
In a cell himself since Saturday night, Josef relented and gave police the security access codes to the basement on Sunday night.
Police found several rooms 170 centimetres (5.5 feet) high equipped with water and a television.
Josef Fritzl had been refusing to answer questions put by detectives, although Gerhard Sedlacek, a prosecution spokesman, said Elisabeth's accusations of kidnapping and incest are "credible".
Austria's most notable prior case was that of Natascha Kampusch, locked up by a man in the basement of a house for eight years before she escaped.
Kampusch was 10 when Wolfgang Priklopil abducted her on her way to school in 1998. The 44-year-old kidnapper killed himself hours after she fled, throwing himself under a train.
Three young girls were also locked up for seven years by their mentally ill mother near Linz.