Abducted girl ‘thought only of escape’

THE young Austrian woman imprisoned for eight-and-a-half years in an underground cell told journalists that she “thought only of escape” during her entire ordeal, and once tried to jump out of her captor’s car.

Natascha Kampusch, who bolted to freedom on August 23 while her captor busied himself with a cell phone call, told the Austrian weekly magazine News she repeatedly asked herself: “Why, of all the many millions of people, did this have to happen to me?”

She added that she often dreamed about killing her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, with an axe.

Priklopil, 44, killed himself within hours of her escape by jumping in front of a commuter train.

In a separate interview with the mass-circulation daily Kronen Zeitung, Ms Kampusch said she once tried to jump out of Priklopil’s car, “but he held me back and then sped away”. She did not say when that failed attempt occurred.

“I always had the thought: ‘Surely I didn’t come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined.’ I always felt like a poor chicken in a hen house. You saw on TV how small my cell was — it was a place to despair.”

News printed a large colour photograph of a pensive-looking Ms Kampusch on its cover, showing her with piercing blue eyes and a pink headscarf covering part of her strawberry blonde hair.

The magazine said it interviewed Ms Kampusch at Vienna’s General Hospital, where a cardiologist examined her for possible heart trouble. She said she had suffered throughout her captivity from heart palpitations that at times made her dizzy and rendered her memory of some events “fuzzy”.

Ms Kampusch called her escape “completely spontaneous”.

“I was there behind the gate to the garden and I felt dizzy. I realised for the first time how weak I really was,” she said.

Last night, a 40-minute prerecorded interview with Ms Kampusch was aired nationwide on public broadcaster ORF.

Early in her captivity, Ms Kampusch said she threw water bottles at the wall in frustration and despair and would have “gone crazy” if kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil had not occasionally allowed her upstairs six months after she was snatched off the street as a freckle-faced 10-year-old.

The wheezing of a ventilator that pumped air into her cell was “unbearable”, Ms Kampusch said in the interview — a 40-minute prerecorded account that gave Austrians their first glimpse of the young woman whose nightmare entranced the nation.

Christoph Feurstein, the journalist who interviewed her on Tuesday at an undisclosed location, said Ms Kampusch spoke “from the gut” in the TV interview.

Among the more touching moments in the interview, he added, were Ms Kampusch describing the stillness of the cell when she was first thrust inside, and her account of how she once struggled in vain to make eye contact with people when her captor took her shopping.

ORF said Ms Kampusch had decided which questions to answer and had refused to be asked anything intimate. Police have said she may have had sexual contact with her captor, but have refused to elaborate.