Austrian captor acted alone, say investigators

The case of three women held captive in a suburban home in Cleveland has brought to mind kidnappings elsewhere, including that of Austrian schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch in 1998.

However, while there are three suspects in the Cleveland case, Natascha’s kidnapper almost certainly acted alone, according to a report by special investigators.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a tiny windowless room under his garage until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil took his own life.

The original investigation found there were no accomplices. But theories of a second perpetrator and of a police cover-up to protect senior figures involved in a supposed child pornography ring persisted, and were partly supported by Kampusch’s father.

Last July, Austria’s parliament appointed a team of experts including members of the FBI and Germany’s BKA Federal Crime Office to check whether mistakes were made in investigating one of the country’s most notorious crimes.

“The evaluation showed that Wolfgang Priklopil almost certainly carried out the abduction alone,” BKA president Joerg Ziercke told a news conference in Vienna last month.

“No connections could be established between Wolfgang P and any red-light, sado-masochist or paedophile scene, despite wide-ranging investigations,” the experts wrote in a 156-page report.

A film based on Kampusch’s autobiography, 3,096 Days, came out in February, showing her being starved and raped and occasionally let out of her six- square metre cell to sleep in Priklopil’s bed or go on an outing.

The experts’ report, the result of 10,000 hours of work by a team of 13 going through 300,000 pages of documents, found there was no doubt that Priklopil had killed himself on the day that Kampusch escaped.

It said there had been some errors in the original investigation but they had not materially affected the result.

Austria was shocked again by an abuse scandal in 2008 when it emerged that Josef Fritzl had held his daughter Elisabeth in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, one of whom he murdered through neglect. He is in jail for life.