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Natascha Kampusch, the young woman held captive for eight years in a Vienna basement, has questioned whether Austrian officials were right to pull the country's latest child kidnap victims so "abruptly" from the household cellar where they were born.

Ms Kampusch, 20, also said that those offering "so-called expert opinion" on the case of Elisabeth Fritzl - who bore six children by her own father during 24 years in captivity - should shut up "because they are probably wrong".

In an interview with Puls 4, a private television station, Ms Kampusch said that the Fritzl children had to get used to their new lives, and being thrust suddenly into a strange new world could not help them.

Commentary: a society that nurtures secrets

What society would accept the probability of three children being left on the doorstep of Josef F and grant him adoption?

Multimedia

• Pictures: house of horror

BACKGROUND

• Why are child abuse scandals happening in Austria?

• Analysis: damage caused may never be healed

• Brutal double-life of Josef Fritzl emerges

• Police search other Fritzl properties in Austria

Related Links

• Fritzl's victims: the scale of the damage emerges

• Austria: police convinced Josef Fritzl acted alone

• Great evil took place in that cellar

She said: "Although they are now in a secret location, I believe it might have been better to leave them where they were - although that was probably impossible - because that was, of course, their environment. Pulling them abruptly out of there without any transition and isolating them cannot be good for them."

Ms Kampusch was abducted at the age of ten and held by her kidnapper, Wolfgang Prikopil, in a small cellar under his garage until she managed to escape in August 2006. Prikopil committed suicide a few hours later by throwing himself under a train.

But the woman who was once Austria's most famous kidnapping victim said it would be wrong to compare her case to that of the Fritzls, because the children born to Elisabeth Fritzl and kept with her in the cellar had never known any other world.

She said: "This case is not like mine, where that was not my environment. They were born there and I can imagine that there is a strong attachment to that place."

Ms Kampusch's concerns run counter to the more optimistic accounts of the doctors treating Josef Fritzl's victims - Elisabeth, her six surviving children and Rosemarie, his wife.

Dr Berthold Kepplinger, director of the neuropsychiatric clinic in Amstetten where the victims are being treated, spoke yesterday of an "astonishing" family reunion, bringing together two of the three children who were kept in the cellar - the third is on a life support machine in a separate hospital - and the three children who lived upstairs with their "grandfather".

The fear, Dr Kepplinger said, was that the two groups would shy clear of each other. "But it was not like that - it was astonishing how easy and natural this first encounter was," he said.

Psychiatrists and doctors are counselling the mother and children on how to come to terms with their unimaginable ordeal.

But experts - including Mas Friedrich, the psychiatrist who looked after Natascha Kampusch - say that could take years. “It could take between five and eight years,” Dr Friedrich said.

Ms Kampusch, who has offered to help the Fritzl family, was not so sure. "You can't really say from the outside," she said in the interview. "I think that most people who are now giving their so-called expert opinion should hold back because they are probably wrong. They should wait and see what they need and when."

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