WITH the poise of an actress, Natascha Kampusch stepped out of the gloom of her dungeon existence tonight into the blinding lights of a television studio.

It was her first interview since she escaped the clutches of a psychopath in Vienna.

Between the ages of 10 and 18 she had talked to one person only: her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, whom yesterday she called simply “the criminal”. Tens of millions of viewers in Austria and Germany tuned in to hear her.

“I think I was stronger than him,” she said. “He had an unstable personality . . . no self-confidence. Within a few hours of him kidnapping me I could see that he wasn’t normal.”

From the age of 12, she had been planning to make a break for freedom. “I promised my future self that I would never abandon the thought of escape,” she said in a clear, sophisticated German that she learnt through reading rather than conversation.

"Once I wanted to jump out of the moving car on to the road but he held me tight and accelerated so fast that I was thrown against the door,” she said.

Perhaps the most poignant moment came when she described how, on a rare visit to the outside world with her captor, she would try mutely to appeal for help. “On a visit to a shop with him, I was approached by a sales assistant who said: ‘Can I help you?’ I didn’t know what to do. What could I say? The best I could do was to smile in such a way that I resembled my old photograph which I supposed that the police had issued.”

The blonde, rosy-cheeked and attractive Austrian teenager also appeared in the first pictures released of her since she fled her kidnapper.

The pictures, released by News magazine, reveal a very different image to the photos showing a smiling chubby child sitting with her legs crossed and chin resting on her arm.

With her appearance kept a closely guarded secret until now, the public have so far had to draw their own conclusions as to how the teenager might now look. Finally, two weeks after Fraulein Kampusch escaped her captor Wolfgang Priklopil, that question has been answered.

Wearing jeans and a purple shirt and sporting a long scarf tied around her head, the images reveal a poised, thoughtful young woman, looking relaxed and smiling. But the pictures mask the torment that Fraulein Kampusch reveals she endured during her eight years as a prisoner.

In her first interviews since her freedom, the teenager told how she thought only of escape during her entire ordeal, once even trying to jump out of her captor’s car. She also reveals how she dreamt about decapitating Priklopil.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president