Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said on Wednesday the government planned to launch an image campaign to restore its reputation abroad after an incest case that shocked the world.

The plight of Elisabeth Fritzl, whose 73-year old father Josef sexually abused her and kept her in a windowless basement for 24 years has put the eastern Austrian town of Amstetten in the international media spotlight. “It’s not Austria that is the perpetrator. This is an unfathomable criminal case, but also an isolated case,” Gusenbauer said in his first public reaction.

Also, the police said they are looking into possible links between the murder of a young woman who was found murdered in lake Mondsee and Fritzl. Austrian broadcaster ORF said police had been given information concerning a woman called Martina Posch who disappeared in 1986 at the age of 17, and whose body was found ten days later wrapped in a plastic sheet on the edge of a lake.

Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigation unit in

Lower Austria told Reuters the province of Upper Austria had passed on the information about an unsolved murder, but would not give details.

“We won’t allow the whole country to be held hostage by one man,” he told journalists in Vienna.

The case has sent shockwaves through Austria less than two years after an Austrian teenager, Natascha Kampusch, escaped from the basement where she had been locked up by an abductor for eight years.

Gusenbauer said the government planned to hire consultants to get the campaign under way and would use “all technical and professional means available to rectify” Austria's image.

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