"I had various short flings with women in Ghana"
Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, travelled to Ghana for sex with local women, according to details of a psychologist's report published in the Austrain media

Fritzl claims that he travelled to Ghana for 18 months in 1963, three years before he carried out a rape in his hometown for which he was later jailed.

He said: "I had various short flings with women in Ghana, nothing serious.

"I paid either money or gave presents, but I was really cautious because I was worried about sexually transmitted diseases. I always chose nice girls - no prostitutes - for that reason."

He also denied his children's claims that he physically abused them during their incarceration in the cellar.

"They are all saying that now because they have been manipulated," he claimed.

"The fact is I was a very loving father and husband."

Fritzl, 73, who admits imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth, 42, in the cellar in his home in Amstetten, Austria, and fathering her seven children, is due to go trial next year accused of rape, incarceration, incest and manslaughter.

He told the psychologist Adelheid Kastner that he had been brought up starved of affection.

"She used to beat me, hit me until I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. It left me feeling totally humiliated and weak," he said.

"She didn't just used to beat me, she swore at me all the time and called me Satan and criminal. She told me that she only got pregnant to prove to my dad that she wasn't infertile and that she had never wanted me. She said I was good for nothing."

But when he grew up he punished his mother by keeping her locked in a room at the top of the family home until her death in 1980.

"I then bricked in the window so that she never again saw the light of day," he is quoted as saying.