Police 'would not have found Austrian teenager’s cell'

THE cramped, underground cell where an Austrian teenager was held captive for more than eight years might never have been discovered even if police had searched the house, an investigator said yesterday.

“Neither a normal house search nor a thermal imaging camera would have discovered this labyrinth,” Major General Gerhard Lang of Austria’s Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau said in a newspaper interview.

Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped on her way to school in Vienna when she was 10. Her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, largely confined her to the windowless cell in his home.