Kidnapped Austrian girl reunited with family

Natascha Kampusch

VIENNA - An Austrian teenager who escaped eight years' captivity in the hands of a man she had to call "master" simply asked for her favourite toy car when she was reunited with her family, her father said today.

The disappearance of Natascha Kampusch at the age of 10 as she walked to school in 1998 remains one of Austria's most baffling crime mysteries.

Speaking about the moment he was reunited with his daughter, Kampusch's father, Ludwig Koch, told the Austrian daily Kurier: "She said: 'Dad, I love you.' And the next question was: 'Is my toy car still there?' It was Natascha's favourite toy, I never gave it away in all those years."

He and her half-sister identified the 18-year-old yesterday and were joined by her mother, Brigitta Sirny, today at the hotel Kampusch is staying at with a policewoman and a psychologist.

Sirny said she had always been sure her daughter was alive and could not believe being finally reunited with her.

"She threw her arms around me, I embraced her," Sirny told state broadcaster ORF, tears streaming down her face. "I'm so proud she made it, she found an occasion to flee."

Kampusch escaped yesterday while her kidnapper was distracted, police said. A man police believe to be her captor committed suicide by throwing himself under a train soon after.

Police pictures showed the windowless dungeon Kampusch had been kept in -- a 6-sq-metre room, hidden underneath the house's garage, reachable only by a vault-like hatch of fortified steel.

The cell, equipped with running water and a toilet, was stacked with shelves of books, toys, a radio and a television.

Sabine Freudenberger, a police officer from a town near Vienna, one of the first to speak to Kampusch, said: "Natascha was pale and extremely thin ... trembling the whole time."

"She took my hand and didn't let go of it all afternoon. She was so happy that it was all over," she told broadcaster ORF.

Freudenberger described how the young woman had told her she had spent nearly every day with her captor, had breakfast with him, had helped him with gardening and housekeeping.

"He became something of a father figure to her," she said.

Another policeman who questioned Kampusch told local news agency APA Kampusch was forced to call her captor "master" in the first years of her ordeal. Police said it was unclear whether Kampusch had been abused.

Kampusch escaped from the garden of the house of the kidnapper, who police identified as Wolfgang Priklopil, in Strasshof, a hamlet 25km outside Vienna and some 15km from where she had lived in a northeastern suburb of the city.

She showed up in another garden nearby and identified herself to a neighbour.

Police said they wanted to know details of the relationship between Kampusch and the man, given that she appeared to develop "Stockholm Syndrome", a psychological condition in which long-held captives begin to identify with their captors.

For the first few years, the young woman had not even known her kidnapper's name, police said. But her captor had recently his eased his security measures, allowing her occasional outings in the village with him. He was distracted by a phone call when Kampusch fled, investigator Erich Zwettler told Sky Television.

"He noticed his victim had escaped, panicked, jumped into his car and drove away fast," Zwettler said. Priklopil's red sports car was found abandoned in a Vienna parking lot.

Police said it was virtually certain Priklopil was the man who committed suicide while a manhunt was under way. While his body was mutilated by the train, he had the key to Priklopil's car in his pocket and wore his clothes.

Priklopil, a communications technician, had been questioned by police soon after the 10-year-old disappeared, just like hundreds of owners of white vans similar to the one a school-friend had seen Kampusch get into the day she vanished.

- REUTERS