Film portrays horrors of Austrian cellar victim’s ordeal

A new film based on the story of the Austrian kidnap victim, Natascha Kampusch, shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Ms Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006. Her captor committed suicide.

Ms Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.