AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) – 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 on Monday. 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 meters (5 ft 6 in) high and officials in Amstetten said the basement labyrinth even contained a padded cell. Fritzl had hidden the entrance to the cell behind shelves and only he knew the secret code for the reinforced concrete door, said officials. The case unfolded when a 19-year-old girl — the oldest of the three — became seriously ill and was hospitalized, prompting doctors to appeal for the girl’s mother <b>…</b>