Cellar horror brings back memories of Natascha's captivity

This week’s appalling discoveries in the Austrian town of Amstetten recall the case of Natascha Kampusch, the girl who spent eight years largely confined to an underground room in a Vienna suburb.

Miss Kampusch, who is now 20, said yesterday she wanted to offer Elisabeth Fritzl emotional and financial support to help overcome the trauma of her experiences.

Wolfgang Priklopil snatched Miss Kampusch from the street as she was walking to school, aged just 10, and held her until she escaped in August 2006.

She said she felt like a “poor chicken in a henhouse” during her captivity, and would have “gone crazy” had her kidnapper not allowed her upstairs into his house.

Later Priklopil, a communications technician who killed himself by jumping in front of a train soon after Miss Kampusch escaped, took his victim out on errands, and in this sense her ordeal was perhaps less gruelling than that endured by the Fritzl family, three of whom have apparently never even seen sunlight.

When Priklopil took Miss Kampusch out on errands, she said, he would make her walk in front of him, apparently to minimise the chances of her escaping.

On one occasion she tried to leap from his car, but was held back.

“I always had the thought: surely I didn’t come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined,” she told an Austrian newspaper.

In another interview a year on from her release, Miss Kampusch said she had begun to feel sorry for Priklopil, and called him “a poor soul – lost and misguided”.

A month after her return to the normal world, Miss Kampusch was inundated with offers from film studios to turn her story into a movie, and earlier this year she hosted her own talk show on Austrian television.