Friend tried to calm Kampusch kidnapper before suicide

The man who held a girl captive for more than eight years in Austria spent some of his last hours in a panicked state, driving around Vienna with a friend, before he committed suicide, a friend said today.

Police asked Ernst Holzapfel later that day to identify a photograph of Wolfgang Priklopil, who had thrown himself beneath a commuter train after his hostage, Natascha Kampusch, escaped on August 23.

“It was terrible for me,” Holzapfel said in comments quoted by Austrian radio. “At the police station, I then had to identify Mr. Priklopil in the photo after the suicide.”

Holzapfel – who met Priklopil in the 1980s and worked with him in the 90s - said he knew nothing about Kampusch’s escape, after she was imprisoned for eight years in Priklopil’s tidy, suburban home just north of the Austrian capital.

Kampusch, who was 10 when she was snatched off a Vienna street, was kept in a basement cell.

Holzapfel said he never noticed anything unusual about his friend’s home or about the young woman staying there.

He said he met Kampusch there last month, and that she seemed friendly and happy.

Police today resumed questioning the teenager and combed through the house where she was held, carting off videos and handwritten letters they hope will shed new light on her ordeal.

Investigators who met with Natascha in the secure, undisclosed location where she has been resting since her dramatic escape said she was chatty and left “a very nice, friendly impression”.

“The big question, naturally, is: Was there more than one perpetrator?” said Maj. Gen Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, which has not ruled out that Wolfgang Priklopil might have had help when he snatched Kampusch as she walked to school at age 10 on March 2, 1998.

Police, Lang conceded, have many other “burning questions” for Kampusch but will respect her privacy and not push her too hard.

“Everything will happen the way she wants it to,” said Armin Halm, a police spokesman.

Lang said investigators also want to ask her about how much freedom she was allowed.