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.

Meanwhile, investigators said they were now painstakingly trying to reconstruct the life of Fritzl, who had seven children with his daughter.

DNA tests have confirmed 73-year-old Josef Fritzl was the father of all six of his daughter’s surviving children and prosecutors are probing him for rape, incest, coercion and the death of the seventh child, whose remains he burnt in a furnace.

“Now the DNA tests prove he is both the father and grandfather of the children, we must reconstruct his entire life, piece by piece,” Franz Prucher, head of security in Lower Austria told Reuters.

“Who did he meet, where did he shop, where did he go? We have 24 years to cover,” Prucher said, adding further details would be given at a news conference later on Wednesday.

Amstetten officials say they do not blame local authorities for failing to discover the case earlier and say those who allowed Fritzl and his wife to care for three of Elisabeth’s children acted within the law.