Professional team help victim reclaim life after years in paedophile's lair

VIENNA - The girl who lost her childhood was somewhere in Austria at the weekend, trying with the help of a round-the-clock team of professionals to begin reclaiming her life. But, for all the official care Natascha Kampusch is still, emotionally, in a psychological limbo from which she will surely take years to emerge, if ever.

Tellingly, the girl whose eight-year existence as the captive of an obsessed paedophile is almost beyond imagining has not asked for any contact with her parents. Nor, perhaps mercifully, will she be questioned further about her ordeal until today at the earliest.

The story that has shocked the world came to light on Thursday in Strasshof, north-east of Vienna. There, in the Heine Strasse - a street of tidy houses with flower boxes - a 71-year-old woman, known as Inge T, was having a quiet night in. Suddenly, a pale, sparsely clothed young woman appeared in her garden and started beating on the window in wild panic. She said: "I am Natascha Kampusch." Inge let her in and phoned the police.

"The girl sent me immediately back into the house," said Inge T. "She was afraid that the man would kill me if he saw me." The man, of course, was Kampusch's captor, Wolfgang Priklopil. The 44-year-old news technician was an obsessive type, neighbours said, a perfectionist and loner who was constantly renovating his house. It was Priklopil who sat in a white Mercedes van with blacked-out windows on Vienna's Rennbahnweg in March 1998. Kampusch has said that she had seen the man as she walked to school that morning and, sensing something was wrong, tried to cross the street. But Priklopil was faster. He hit out at her, telling Kampusch : "This way or that way, you wouldn't have got away from me. I would have got you another day."

So began the next eight years of Kampusch's life. At 60 Heine Strasse, Priklopil's beige-painted two-storey home, Natascha was taken to her 6sq m prison. It was underneath the garage, the entrance disguised as a workshop pit - a recess in the floor used to repair cars from below. Then, down some steep stairs, came the second entrance: a 69cm-tall steel safe door hidden behind a chest of drawers. Kampusch's new home was a 1.6m-high pen, which police say was built long before her abduction. It was windowless, though ventilated, had a bunk bed, some shelves and a writing desk. There was a toilet and sink.

While she was trapped here, a massive hunt for her was under way. As "missing" posters were taped to trees, helicopters with heat-seeking equipment were scrambled and police search dogs scoured every inch of the Austrian capital. Lakes were dredged and Kampusch's parents made tearful pleas for their little girl to come home. Investigators even headed to Hungary, where she had holidayed with her father the week before she disappeared. But they found no trace. Priklopil was interviewed, but had an alibi. His home was never searched.

Psychologists have called Priklopil a "highly sadistic perpetrator who did all he could to have a slave". Kampusch was allowed to watch television and listen to the radio. Priklopil brought her books and newspapers and even taught her. She was aware of world events. She even spoke about the 2004 tsunami. "She said they would get up early and have breakfast together," said policewoman Sabine Freudenberger, 23. "They spent the whole day together. She helped with the housework, tended the garden, everything." But at night she returned to her dungeon. Although she has described him as a "criminal", she has claimed that "Wolfgang was always kind to me".

Psychologists are divided over claims that Kampusch developed a severe form of "Stockholm syndrome", the condition whereby long-held captives begin to identify with their captors. Others maintain her willingness to acquiesce was more to do with her young age. This, her high level of intelligence and "iron will", it is thought, is why it was eight years on that Kampusch took her chance to escape.

Investigators who initially questioned Priklopil say Priklopil had become more careless recently, losing interest in his child prisoner as Kampusch became an adult. Priklopil started taking her to the bakery and, according to some reports, even allowed her to go into the village alone. Kampusch did not fulfil Priklopil's perverse "Pygmalion fantasies" of having a "little princess" slave over whom he had complete control. Experts say Kampusch must have realised this now put her life in danger and prompted her escape. "

- INDEPENDENT