Book recounts horrors of cellar kidnap victim

AN Austrian girl who has suffered sexual, physical and mental torture as a prisoner trapped in a cellar for eight years has come out with an autobiography describing how she was forced to work almost naked, sleep with her captor and beaten 200 times a week.

In her book titled 3,096 Days, Natascha Kampusch said how her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, who kidnapped her at the age of 10, forced her to share his bed. “When I was 14... I lay stiff with fright on his bed as he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his with plastic cuffs. I wasn’t allowed to make a sound.

“It wasn’t about sex. The man who’d beat me and locked me in the cellar had something else in mind: he simply wanted something to cuddle,” she wrote about Priklopil, a communications technician.