A SCRAWLED note dropped secretly near a dustbin may have saved the life of a 13-year-old girl in Germany who was tortured and sexually abused over five weeks.

The girl, named only as Stephanie, was held captive by a 35-year-old man who gagged her and locked her in a wooden chest every time he left his Dresden apartment.

But she was able to drop a series of notes outside the flat, giving the address where she was being held, the name of her captor and an urgent plea for help. “A CALL FOR HELP!” read the note that was eventually found by a dog-walker.

“I beg anyone who finds this note: please call the police immediately. This is not a joke. You should go to Laubestrasse 2. In the apartment of Mario M you will find the 13-year-old who has been missing since Wednesday, January 11, 2006. Act quickly. Every minute counts. This is a matter of life and death! Please help! This is not a joke! Many thanks to the rescuer.”

The ground-floor flat where the paedophile was holding the girl is only a few minutes from her home — yet it took the police 36 days and the chance discovery of the note before they were able to rescue her. The man who has been arrested has a previous conviction for sexually assaulting children, which has led to condemnation of the police and social services.

“Our problem was that Stephanie seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth — she disappeared in the middle of the town,” said Sonja Kuessel, who led the team of detectives searching for her. “We had to investigate every possible angle. Had she run away from home? Was she trying to pursue her dream of becoming a model? Had she been run down somewhere?”

Stephanie, a shy, bespectacled teenager, was bundled into a car on her way to school. The kidnapper seems to have planned the crime carefully. To stifle the curiosity of neighbours he had ordered blinds for his flat and had started to muzzle his two big dogs. “When he went shopping he tied up the girl and stuffed her in a specially made chest,” Christian Avenarius, the state prosecutor, said.

At night the girl was allowed to leave her improvised prison with the kidnapper and his dogs. The neighbourhood was deserted at night and no witnesses recall seeing them. But Stephanie used the cover of darkness to drop her notes. There were four in all. A dog-walker found one of the notes on Wednesday and took it to the police, who stormed the apartment the next morning.

The girl’s father spoke of his relief yesterday. “I am proud of my daughter, proud that she was clever enough to write the note despite the danger that she was in. We were struck dumb when we saw each other again for the first time and we just fell into each other’s arms,” he said.

The police claim to have overlooked the paedophile because he had recently changed his apartment and was therefore not recorded at the central police registry.

The Stephanie case comes in the midst of a heated debate about Germany’s treatment of paedophiles. A university clinic in Berlin has begun treating a group of 100 people who believe they have paedophile leanings in an attempt to prevent them from committing a crime. The logic is that paedophilia is a disorder that can be spotted and dealt with before it becomes child-threatening behaviour.

For many Germans, however, this liberal approach has led to an unacceptable softening of the law. Convicted paedophiles are often released — as was Mario M — on the basis of a psychiatric assessment concluding that they no longer represent a danger to society. These assessments have often been flawed and the released offenders frequently disappear from view.

“At the very least,” said Helmut Ruester, of the victims’ association White Ring, “local police should be made aware of previously convicted paedophiles in the neighbourhood.”