Austrian captive 'felt like battery hen' [+video]

Kampusch talked of starting a charity for people who did not have enough food. Picture / Reuters

BERLIN - Her blonde hair swept under a headscarf and eyes showing emotions of suffering and quiet defiance, Natascha Kampusch, the teenager held prisoner in an underground cell for eight years, appeared on Austrian television last night and told how she had imagined cutting her captor's head off with an axe to escape.

Kidnapped child held captive for eight years [+pictures]

It was the moment Austria had been waiting for.

Ever since Natascha, 18, made her escape from her kidnapper, a 44-year-old communications technician on 23 August, offers for an interview with her had risen to more than a million euros.

Last night, Natascha agreed to break her two-week attempt to escape the media. Austrian viewers witnessed a composed young woman.

Wearing a purple headscarf and blouse, she coughed nervously during her 45-minute interview.

Natascha was 10 when her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, grabbed her off a Vienna street as she walked to school and bundled her into the back of a van.

She spent most of the next eight and a half years confined beneath the garage of her kidnapper's suburban home in a converted yet windowless car-inspection pit.
It was equipped with a bunk bed, a bookshelf and a radio.

She finally managed to escape while Priklopil was making a phone call, and staggered, terrified, into a neighbour's front garden where she was found, looking thin and ghostly white.

Priklopil committed suicide hours after her escape by throwing himself under a train.

Yesterday, Natascha said: "I had bad thoughts. Sometimes I dreamt of chopping his head off, had I possessed an axe."

She added: "I kept thinking: I was certainly not born to be locked up and have my life ruined. I was in despair over this injustice. I always felt like a poor battery hen on a chicken farm."

She described Priklopil as somebody who "suffered heavily from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful".

She feared that any attempt to escape would have meant that she would have been permanently confined to her cell and never let out.

"I was always working towards a point when the time would be right, but I felt I could risk nothing, particularly an escape attempt."

A major police hunt for Natascha failed to find her.

She said that, after seeing television reports of diggers being used to scour gravel pits for her body, she lost hope: "I was convinced nobody would come looking for me and I would never be found. I was locked up. I could never understand why I was being locked up for doing nothing."

She recalled how she was bundled into the back of Priklopil's van in March 1998: "I thought he was going to kill me," she said.

She was taken to his house in the Vienna suburb of Strasshof and immediately put in a pitch-dark pit under his garage.

"He only brought a light after half an hour. I was allowed upstairs to wash after six months. For the first two years, I heard no radio."

Natascha said that, on the rare occasions when she accompanied her abductor on shopping expeditions, she had tried desperately to make eye contact with people and signal to them that she needed help.

No one responded.

Her escape, which began while she was vacuuming the inside of Priklopil's BMW parked outside his garage on 23 August, was unplanned.

"It was completely spontaneous. When I saw him telephoning, I ran out of the garden gate and into some allotments nearby and started talking to people.

"But they just shrugged their shoulders and walked past. So I started jumping the fences of the gardens in total panic - just like in an action film," she said.

Finally, Natascha saw a neighbour's house with a ground-floor window open.

She heard the sound of a woman working in the kitchen inside.

"I told the woman to call the police. I was terrified that he was going to find me and kill me," she said.

In the interviews that were given to Austrian television and two Viennese publications yesterday, Natascha made a point of refusing to discuss intimate details of her personal relationship with her captor.

"I was faced with the alternatives of being on my own or with him, and neither was particularly exciting."

Of Priklopil's suicide, she said: "It was simply a waste. Nobody should kill themselves. He could have given me and the police so much information. But, basically, I don't want to talk about Mr Priklopil any longer."

Natascha also gave a notion of her future plans, which are likely to be heavily influenced by the estimated €1.2 ($2,366,000) she is expected to obtain in fees and in compensation from Austria's criminal injuries compensation board.

"I would like to start a foundation which helps people who do not get enough to eat."

- INDEPENDENT