Austrian teen describes abduction, imprisonment

The young Austrian woman imprisoned for more than eight years in a dingy, cell-like room described her terrible ordeal last week, in her first television interview.

"The first time I didn't see the cellar room at all because it was pitch black. No lamp was screwed in. He only brought that after several minutes or half an hour," Natascha Kampusch, now 18, told the Austrian public broadcaster ORF.

Kampusch said she would sometimes pound the walls of her room with her fists, when she was overcome by anger or despair at her abduction. "I was very distressed and very angry, and I was angry that I didn't cross to the other side of the street and that I didn't go to school with my mother. It was awful," she said.

The television interview came hours after the publication of an article, in which she said she longed for freedom. "I thought only of escape," she told the Austrian weekly magazine News, two weeks after she bolted to freedom while her captor was on a cell phone.

"I always had the thought: Surely I didn't come into this world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined," she is quoted as saying. Kampusch felt like "a poor chicken in a hen house" while in the tiny makeshift room in the basement of her captor's home in the Vienna suburb of Strasshof.

"You saw on TV how small my cell was it was a place to despair," she said. Hours after Kampusch fled to neighbours, her captor, 44-year-old Wolfgang Priklopil, committed suicide by jumping in front of a commuter train.

The magazine said it interviewed Kampusch at Vienna's General Hospital, where a cardiologist examined her for possible heart trouble. She said she had suffered throughout her captivity from heart palpitations that at times made her dizzy and rendered her memory of some events "fuzzy."

The teen also said often wasn't given enough to eat. Another Austrian magazine reported she weighed just 92 pounds when she was rescued, the same amount she weighed when she was snatched off the streets at age 10 while walking to school.

Surprisingly, Kampusch said she has made a smooth transition to freedom and has "no trouble living with other people." On Wednesday night, a 20-minute prerecorded interview with Kampusch will air on Austrian public broadcaster ORF, which said her face would be visible unless she requested a last-minute electronic retouching.

Kampusch also granted an interview to the mass-circulation Kronen Zeitung, also set to hit newsstands Wednesday afternoon. ORF said Kampusch had submitted the questions for the interview and had refused to be asked anything intimate.

Police have said she may have had sexual contact with Priklopil, but refused to elaborate.

(CTV.CA NEWS)