Doctors see tough times for Austrian kidnap girl

Natasha Kampusch

VIENNA - Doctors warned today that Natascha Kampusch would soon have to face the trauma of eight years in captivity after the euphoria of explaining her ordeal to a mesmerised international television audience.

The 18-year-old Austrian recounted in her first interviews with local media yesterday the agony, hunger and despair of being locked up by Wolfgang Priklopil in a windowless cell beneath his garage in a Vienna commuter town.

Pictures of her baby blue eyes and her bright smile went around the world and journalists rushed to praise her stamina and sturdy will. "Her Fear. Her Strength. Her Plans," headlined Kurier, Austria's most popular quality newspaper, showing a profile shot of a composed Kampusch on its front page.

But her doctors warned that the young woman would soon come up against the trauma she had seemingly managed to survive relatively unscathed and would need treatment for years to come.

"She is in a phase of euphoria," her psychiatrist Max Friedrich told a news conference. "Imagine something nice happens to you, you get excited, you get an adrenalin buzz. But after the highs there will be breaks."

Kampusch had refused to go to sleep when she first came to the hospital and said she wanted to talk all the time to them, one of her carers at the hospital said.

"Her psychotherapy will last for years," Friedrich added.

Priklopil, a communications technician, snatched the freckle-faced 10 year-old on her way to school in 1998.

Kampusch dashed to freedom on August 23 when he was distracted by a phone call as she vacuumed his BMW. Priklopil, who was 44, killed himself shortly after by jumping under a train.

After escaping her 6 sq m cell, Kampusch found herself at the centre of a bidding war among the international media for her first picture or her first interview.

Around 2.6 million Austrians, almost a third of the population, were glued to their TV sets, watching the blonde young woman describe in wrenching detail her years of torment, but also smiling and joking with the interviewer.

While Kampusch may have seemed surprisingly normal to her audience, she will have to fight for a normal life, her psychologist Waltraud Bangerl said.

"This will be very difficult for her because she knows that she is currently living in a very artificial environment," Bangerl said at the news conference.

"She will have to find her own rhythm ... She will need some time until she can find the ground under her feet."

Friedrich said they understood why the media had taken such a shine to Kampusch.

"A woman approaches the public with fantastic articulation, choosing her words very carefully and being very specific," said Friedrich, adding he had earlier expected a hollow-eyed creature to emerge from such an ordeal.

"This is a wonder, which is why I can understand the interest," he said. "Somewhere in the world, someone returned from the dead."

- REUTERS