Austria: Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian teenager who seized the imagination of millions when she escaped after more than eight years at the mercy of a "paranoid" male captor, spoke last night for the first time of her "place of despair" confined to a tiny enclosed pit outside the capital, Vienna.
After more than 3,000 days of basement captivity and two weeks of cloistered freedom, she went on Austrian national television to talk about her lost adolescence, as the first two print interviews with her were also published.
Wearing a mauve headscarf over her mid-length fair hair, speaking clearly, and with piercing blue eyes, Ms Kampusch opted to reveal her identity in an attempt to ward off paparazzi feuding for the first lucrative pictures of the 18-year-old.
She told the glossy Vienna Weekly News that she felt like a "poor chicken" cooped up in a hen house during the 8½ years she was held by an obsessive communications engineer, Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted her at the age of 10 in 1998, when she was on her way to school after a row with her mother. "I asked myself over and over again, why did this have to happen to me out of millions of people, why me . . . I was convinced that no one would ever look for me again and so I'd never be found . . . I always had the thought: surely I didn't come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined?"
She described her escape two weeks ago as "quite spontaneous", although she said that two years into her ordeal she had resolved to try to flee her captor. But she was terrified of the "repressions" that might follow from a failed escape bid.
"I couldn't risk anything . . . He suffered very strongly from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful. Failure could have meant never getting out of my dungeon again. I had to gain his confidence."
Ms Kampusch, who last week voiced sympathy for her kidnapper after he threw himself under a train within hours of her escape, described her daily routine at his mercy.
She sounded lucid, confident, and in command.
She was allowed to "go upstairs" from her custom-built basement dungeon every day to read, do housework or help her abductor with jobs around the house. "But I was always sent back down immediately," she said.
The worst times were when Priklopil had guests or was out of the house.
"Then I had to spend entire weekends in the dungeon." Her prison was a car repair pit, windowless, six square metres in size, beneath Priklopil's garage.
She revealed how she would frantically seek to make eye contact with passers-by when Priklopil took her for a walk or out shopping.
Describing her escape, Ms Kampusch said: "I made a run for it when I saw him on the phone. I ran in a panic into the allotments and started calling to people. I was there behind the gate to the allotment and I felt dizzy. I realised for the first time how weak I really was . . . But it all clicked.
"On the day of the escape, I was well - physically, mentally and no heart problems."
She suffered from heart palpitations during her imprisonment and went short of food, she said.
An estimated 90 per cent of viewers in Austria were glued to their screens last night for the first glimpse of the girl who had been written off as dead.
The state broadcaster paid nothing for the interview, but holds the rights for marketing worldwide, with the proceeds going into a fund being set up for Ms Kampusch.
The German commercial channel RTL bought the interview and screened it an hour after the Austrian broadcast. During the past two weeks of blanket coverage of the case in Austria, concerns have soared that the victim has shifted from being the hostage of a deranged male to a different form of captivity, under siege from the international media.
Her media adviser, Dieter Ecker, a former political spin doctor, said there had been more than 300 interview requests, book contracts and film deals.
"The only one not in touch has been Steven Spielberg," he told Profil news magazine.
She was critical of the indifference she had encountered from Austrians when she made her escape, and of how the Austrian police had treated her initially.
When she fled, she approached various people working in their allotments for help.
"In vain, because none of them had a mobile phone. They just shrugged their shoulders and carried on . . . Then I saw a window open with someone pottering in the kitchen and I spoke to this woman."
Ms Kampusch's parents divorced after her abduction and the Vienna media have dwelt on the alleged hostility between the girl and her mother. But Ms Kampusch said she now wanted to go on a cruise with her mother.
For the future, she wanted to catch up on her lost school years, take school-leaving exams and perhaps study, law, journalism or drama.
- Guardian service