A defiant 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch slammed the door on her mother on the day that she was kidnapped after a blistering row full of chilling omens.

Frau Kampusch spoke today of the day that she was kidnapped and presented it as the prelude to a kind of Greek tragedy. From the moment she woke up there were portents that something terrible was about to happen.

The strained relationship with her mother Brigitta Sirny has raised speculation about deeper family troubles that may have been exploited by Natascha’s kidnapper during her eight years of captivity in a windowless basement.

"It was a bad day," she said in a further instalment of her interview with the Austrian tabloid Krone Zeitung. "On the evening before I had a fight with my mother because my father brought me home too late and did not accompany me to the apartment door."

Her father Ludwig Koch had taken her to Hungary on a short holiday and had brought her back on March 1, 1998. Relations between her parents were so frayed that Herr Koch had no wish to meet Frau Sirny.

The family lived in a run-down council estate in the north of Vienna; the street gang hung out near their apartment. Frau Kampusch said her mother told her: "God knows what could have happened to you. Someone could have grabbed you." Then she hesitated before developing her thoughts with the interviewer. "And then the next day, while in her care, that really happened. My mother always used to say: ‘Never leave the house after an argument without saying goodbye’."

She said she had put on 10 kilos in the previous few months because of tension in the family and was furious with her mother. According to some reports her mother slapped her that morning when she overslept. In Natascha’s version today, she seemed to take at least some of the blame for the row.

"I thought, ‘I don’t agree with my mother right now’, and to spite her I slammed the door. Because nothing was going to happen to me anyway - that’s pretty heavy when you are kidnapped just half an hour later and you are cowering in the back of a van."

There was one more portent of disaster. A voice inside her told her to cross the road when she saw a man lurking next to a white van. She did not follow her intuition. It was her kidnapper Wolfgang Prikalopil.

She was not to see her parents again for eight and a half years. Although she has tried to reassure them of her continuing love, Frau Kampusch has chosen not to have a lengthy reunion with her divorced parents.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb