Austria police seek accomplices of child captor

Natascha Kampusch

BERLIN - Austrian police said today they were searching for possible accomplices of a kidnapper who held a young girl in a tiny room under his garage for eight years until her dramatic escape this week.

Natascha Kampusch said yesterday that she managed to flee her captor because he could not stand the noise of a vacuum cleaner she had been ordered to use to remove the dust from his car.

Eighteen year-old Natascha was found wandering in the garden of a Vienna suburb looking "half starved and pale" after she managed to escape the underground prison she had been held in ever since she was kidnapped while walking to school at the age of ten.

Her abductor, a 44-year-old communications technician named Wolfgang Priklopil, committed suicide by throwing himself under an express train at Vienna's north station hours after her escape on Wednesday after driving through the city in his red BMW in a frantic search for his captive.

Yesterday Natascha revealed how she finally managed to escape her six by nine foot underground prison beneath the garage at Priklopil's home in Vienna's Strasshof suburb.

She told police that her captor had ordered her out of the pit and told her to vacuum clean the inside of his car.

The phone rang and Priklopil went to answer the call, moving away from the garage to avoid the noise of the vacuum cleaner, although he had left the door open.

"I took a chance and ran," Natascha told police.

Sabine Freudenberger, a policewoman who interviewed Natascha after her escape said she had been forced to call her captor "master" during the initial years of her captivity.

She said Natascha had repeatedly implored Priklopil to let her free and had told him that she wanted to have a family and children.

However Priklopil always rejected her pleas and had warned that "something would happen" to her and her family if she tried to escape.

Natascha, who was reunited with her parents on Thursday, was reported to be too distressed to face the media yesterday.

Her parents said she was "emaciated" and that her skin was " completely white and covered with marks." Police said that she had almost certainly been sexually abused by her captor.

Natascha's father Ludwig Koch wept as he told Austrian television yesterday how he was reunited with his daughter: "Honestly, I didn't think I'd experience this," he said, "She said: "Dad I love you".

The next question was "Is my toy car still there? " It was her favourite toy and I never gave it away all those years. I always put the idea that she was dead out of my mind," he added.

Natascha's prison, which contained a lavatory, books and a video recorder, was kept sealed by a steel door which could only be opened from outside.

She said that for years, she had not been able to leave the pit and that only recently was she allowed out to do household chores.

Although she described Priklopil as a "criminal", she insisted that "Wolfgang was always kind to me." Her remarks were taken yesterday as further evidence that she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition which results in hostages feeling sympathy for their kidnappers.

Her reappearance ended Austria's longest running and most spectacular kidnapping case on record.

But yesterday questions were raised about the police's failed attempts to track down her abductor and there was speculation that Priklopil may have had an accomplice who helped him to kidnap the girl.

Police admitted they had "lost contact" with an eyewitness who watched Natascha on the day of her kidnap in March 1998 when she was bundled into the back of a white van owned by Priklopil as she walked to school from her Vienna home.

The witness, then a girl of twelve, had told police that a second man had been the driver of the vehicle.

"We are not ruling out the possibility of a second man, we are investigating all possibilities," said Nikolaus Koch, a Vienna police spokesman.

After Natascha's kidnap, Austrian police questioned more than 700 white van owners throughout the country.

It emerged yesterday that they has also interviewed Priklopil at the time but had failed to search his home because they were convinced by his story that he was using the van to transport building material.

Priklopil's neighbours said yesterday that his house, which was equipped with steel entrance gates, alarms and surveillance cameras had been visited by council officials on several occasions as they were required to inspect the devices.

"None of them realised that a girl was being kept prisoner inside," said one.

They also said that a local police station, which contained beat officers who knew the neighbourhood inside out, had been closed down while Natascha was held hostage.

- INDEPENDENT