Photos show dungeon dad frolicking in Cyprus

MANY British and European newspapers yesterday published photographs of Josef Fritzl relaxing on beaches in Cyprus and Thailand, while half of his family were held captive in his cellar at home in Amstetten, Austria.

Yesterday, it was The Sun’s main story, with the headline, “Beast beside the seaside”.

Holiday-loving Fritzl was a sun-worshipper, despite never letting three of the seven kids he fathered by his sex-slave daughter see daylight as he forced her to raise them in his dungeon.

Photos of him on a family holiday in the 1970s, before he locked up daughter Elisabeth for almost a quarter of a century, show him working up a tan in Cyprus.

Later he began leaving his wife Rosemarie behind to go on ‘boys only’ trips to Thailand.

These continued until the late 1990s, by which time he had condemned Elisabeth to her life of unspeakable hell.

Fritzl, always desperate to be pictured frolicking in his tight-fitting trunks, spent up to three weeks at a time on his exotic jaunts.

The Daily Mirror says his imprisoned family had to survive alone on meagre rations while he sunned himself.

Fritzl has confessed to holding his daughter captive for 24 years in a cellar in their apartment, sexually abusing her, fathering her children and burning the body of one child who died in infancy.

He is also believed to have been jailed in the 60s for a sexual assault. He reportedly tried to rape a woman in Linz.

The conviction was later deleted from records under procedures. Fritzl is believed to have a further conviction for arson.

Last year it was revealed that the ‘back from the dead’ canoeist John Darwin and his wife had spent time on Cyprus while he was thought to be dead.