An Austrian girl who was kidnapped and held in a garage dungeon for eight years was forced to call her kidnapper "master" and only started to be allowed into the fresh air this year, police have revealed.
Wolfgang Priklopil, 44, a freelance communications technician, who committed suicide yesterday, snatched 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch on March 2, 1998, while she was walking to school in Vienna, Austria.
For eight years her parents and the police have been searching for her and never gave up, despite the widespread belief that she was dead.
Yesterday lunchtime she emerged, pale and skinny, but alive, after a dramatic escape from the tiny, purpose-built dungeon in a garage attached to Priklopil’s house in a leafy town on the edge of Vienna.
Today the Austrian press asked why nobody, including the police — who at one stage had questioned Priklopil about Natascha’s disappearance — and neighbours who spotted her in his garden or even Priklopil’s mother, who used to come round to cook him lunch, suspected she was there.
Adolf Brenner, the chief of police in Deutsch-Wagram, said she seemed to be in good spirits despite her ordeal. Few details have emerged from her time in captivity but she did tell police that Priklopil had forced her to call him Gebiete, an old-fashioned term for master usually found only in fairy stories.
Austrian media reported that the girl said she had been sexually abused. Police said her claims were being investigated but at the moment they were unable to confirm the motive for the kidnapping.
Herr Brenner said: "He seems to have made great efforts to keep her away from the outside world. She was allowed limited access to the television and radio and sometimes she was given videos. On the surface she seems to be in good spirits and has repeatedly said how happy she is to be freed."
However, Erich Zwettler, from the national crime squad, told local media that Natascha was suffering from a severe case of "Stockholm syndrome", the name for the disorder in which kidnap victims start to sympathise with their attackers.
"For years he was her only company," said Herr Zwettler, who added that an emotional bond between captive and kidnapper can "raise its head according to my experience after three, four or five days. In this case you can certainly expect that to happen".
When police raided Priklopil’s two-storey house last night in Strasshof, a 9,000-strong town in the Marktfeld, the "market garden" of Austria, they found a 20in (50cm) hole in the cellar floor under a garage that led into a dungeon that had been Natascha’s bedroom for eight years.
The room was only 6ft x 10ft (1.8m x 3m), and contained a bed, a cupboard and a few children’s books. According to Natascha, she never left her prison at all for the first seven years.
However, a few months ago Priklopil seemed to have decided that he could trust her and started allowing her out into the garden and taking her shopping with him — though he was always there and she was never allowed more than a few feet from his side.
At lunchtime yesterday Natascha was allowed out in the garden but for some reason her captor did not accompany her. Seeing her chance to escape she ran into a nearby property, where she was found by an elderly woman. Natascha told her that she had been held captive in a cellar near by for many years and the woman rang the police.
The teenager was taken to the local police station, where she told them her name. Within minutes police from both the Lower Austria Crime Squad and the special Natascha Taskforce that had been set up when she was first kidnapped were racing towards her.
At about the same time her captor had discovered her escape, jumped into his red BMW and fled at speed. He was spotted by a police patrol heading into Vienna and a 200km/h (125mph) car chase started.
Details are still vague but it appears that he managed to lose the police for a while, during which time he parked his car and called an as-yet unnamed friend for help.
Police found Priklopil's BMW at 5pm in an underground car park below a shopping mall in Vienna but there was no sign of him.
Just before 9pm a call came in describing a man of his description who had just jumped under a train at the Praterstern Vienna North train station.
In the meantime Natascha's family had been notified of her reappearance.
When her father, Ludwig Koch, heard the news that his daughter was almost certainly alive and in Vienna, he broke down, saying: "I hope, I hope, I hope so much that I can hardly bear it, I mean, I just can't believe it. If it is true it will be the greatest thing that could possibly be."
At 7pm yesterday in the Kriminaldirektion 1 police station in Vienna's Berggasse, on the same street where Sigmund Freud had his office, Natascha was reunited with her father.
According to police, Herr Koch walked in and there was a long pause as the two stared at each other. Then Natascha, who was wearing just the simple knee-length orange dress and ballet shoes she had on when she escaped, jumped up and threw her arms around her father's neck.
Herwig Haidinger, the Police Department head, said the pair just held each other while crying uncontrollably. He added: "The only way to imagine it is to picture a movie. It was completely overwhelming."
Herr Koch said afterwards: "I never gave up hope. But I am so wonderfully relieved.
"She is 100 per cent my daughter. For me it's as if she never went away."
Her mother, Brigitte Sirny, was on holiday in Styria when Natascha resurfaced, but has now joined her daughter and former husband at "a secure location" away from media attention, where they will remain for at least two days.
The Austrian Press Agency APA said Natascha had been deeply unhappy shortly before she vanished in 1998 because of her parents' bitter fighting. After her disappearance, their relationship disintegrated altogether and the couple split up.
Natascha's father even accused his estranged wife of involvement in their daughter's abduction, and hired a private detective.
But police have announced that there was no link between the kidnapper and any members of Natascha's family.
Instead, they have admitted that they had interviewed Priklopil soon after the kidnapping after a 12-year old student claimed to have witnessed Natascha being forced into a white van, with a number plate that included a G.
Austrian number plates can be used to identify the geographical location of the current owner and the G is the code for Gaenserndorf, the district were she was found.
Priklopil's neighbours described him as "a very calm and low-key" man who never seemed to miss a day's work. He lived in a house built by his father, and next door to his uncle but never seemed to have guests apart from visits from his pensioner mother, who would come round to make him lunch.
The house was covered with security gadgets, including a high-tech video surveillance system, which Priklopil told neighbours were to "keep out burglars".
He allegedly told them never to pop round for a visit because he had "built a number of surprises into my house and we don't want somebody innocent to get fried".
