As Austria reels from its second child kidnap scandal in two years, police are investigating how a father managed to hold his daughter in a windowless cellar  for 24 years and have seven children by her without authorities and neighbors knowing.

Josef F., a 73-year-old electrical engineer, has confessed to holding his daughter captive in what Austrian media are calling "The House Of Horrors" -- an non-descript building in the small town of Amstetten 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Vienna.

The case first emerged on Sunday and shocked Austria less than two years after Austrian teenager Natascha Kampusch escaped after being seized as a child and locked up in a basement for eight years.

Austria now faces the same soul-searching that followed the Kampusch case, write German newspaper commentators.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Austria still hasn't recovered from the Kampusch case -- the suffering of a girl who was held by her kidnapper for eight years in a cellar near Vienna. The name Kampusch is now associated with the voyeurism of a tabloid press obsessed with details, alleged mistakes by investigators which appear to have been covered up for political reasons, a parliamentary inquiry and a government crisis. But even aside from the political scandal surrounding the investigation, this small country, which isn't exactly unfamiliar with scandals, keeps asking itself: Why didn't anyone notice anything? Did societal control, neighborly care break down?"

"Now Austria could face a similar, tortured debate because the 'Amstetten case' shows frightening parallels: living in a dungeon, the curious unawareness of relatives and neighbors. Who didn't see what, who didn't want to see? What role was played by the wife, who cared for the grandchildren she was told had been secretly left on the doorstep by her daughter, and who didn't demand answers? What moved this woman who lived above a dungeon occupied by four people? Why did the police and youth welfare office fall for the father's claim that his missing daughter lived in a sect and occasionally left her little children on the doorstep?"

"What do the neighbors say who lived next to a house full of strange people and realized nothing whatsoever?"

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:

"Austria is one of those happy countries where a woman can walk alone through a park at night. It only gets dangerous when she comes home."

"Crime in the family can't be fought with surveillance cameras or closed borders. What is required is alertness, interest, compassion -- something that is often deceptively called 'social control.' Not by malevolent pensioners who write down car registration numbers, but by teachers, neighbors or social workers. By people who can ask questions with a clear conscience, who don't present themselves as voyeurs or accusers. In short, what is required is a culture of mutual human respect. That's what makes it possible to ask questions in the first place."

"The local authorities failed. They contributed to the general indifference. But that doesn't exonerate anyone. Everyone is to blame."

Commentator Franz Josef Wagner writes in mass-circulation daily Bild:

"Josef F., 73, doesn't look like Godzilla or Frankenstein's monster. He looks like a pensioner who smoked too much. I have looked at his face again and again. He hasn't got 'monster' written on his forehead. I can't read 'charlatan' in his eyes."

"He is a human being who gets up in the morning, rapes his daughter in the dungeon, then drinks coffee with his wife and goes to work as an electrical engineer. He returns his neighbors' greetings when he meets them. He is an impeccable citizen of Amstetten. The daughter he abused had seven children by him. One of them died. The respected citizen incinerated it in his stove."