AUSTRIA: An Austrian man who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl, kept her hostage for eight years and demanded she call him "my lord" threw himself in front of an express train yesterday, hours after she escaped, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
The dramatic death of Wolfgang Priklopil, a 44-year-old electrician, ended one of Austria's greatest unsolved crimes. A day earlier, shortly after 1pm, a resident of the small town of Strasshof outside Vienna called the police to report a pale and disoriented young woman in his front garden. When an officer arrived, she fell into his arms, saying: "I'm the missing girl."
The missing girl is Natascha Kampusch, who disappeared in March 1998 from a suburb of Vienna while on her way to school.
Police are still awaiting DNA test results but are almost certain the teenager is her. She has the same identifying scar as the missing girl and her old passport was found in the house of her captor.
Yesterday evening, her eight-year ordeal came to an end when she was reunited with her father Ludwig and burst into tears.
"I never gave up hope of seeing her again," said Mr Koch.
"She's 100 per cent my daughter. It's like she's never been away. I'm just incredibly relieved." His daughter was in psychological care yesterday evening and has yet to be questioned in detail about her experience.
"For us the main thing is to stabilise her psychologically and to make her feel secure and trusted," said a spokesman. "The investigation will take as long as it takes."
Shortly after her reappearance, neighbours reported seeing a red BMW speeding away from the cream-coloured house. Police gave chase, but the driver got away.
The spokesman described the dead man as a "technical freak" and a "loner" who apparently only had two male friends.
He helped run a property firm in Vienna with one and he went to the other for help on Wednesday evening, saying he was in trouble for drunk-driving, before vanishing. One of the men said he had once seen Ms Kampusch briefly in the house, but both said they had no idea of his double life.
Investigators said they were unsure of a motive but said it could have been a "spontaneous decision" to snatch the girl from the street on a Monday morning in March 1998 and bundle her into his white Mercedes van.
Another investigator suggested that the girl was a random victim of a well-planned abduction.
In the cellar of Priklopil's scrupulously tidy two-storey home, investigators found a windowless, sound-proof room measuring just three metres by four metres behind a 50cm square door, apparently taken from a tank.
The room was painted beige and strewn with clothes books, papers and children's books with a small television high on one shelf. It contained a high bed and a bathroom and the entrance was down a rickety staircase in the garage, itself sealed with an electronically-controlled heavy steel door.
This was Ms Kampusch's home for eight years and the first details of her everyday life began to emerge yesterday. She was not allowed out of the house and was allowed listen to the radio and read television, but only watch television programmes he had pre-recorded.
Police said that Priklopil had controlled his captive for years by telling her the house was mined and that she would blow herself up if she tried to escape - a threat that proved to be false.
She only managed to escape, they said, because Priklopil had become more relaxed in his treatment of her in recent months
"He was no longer as careful as he had been at the start," said Nikolaus Koch, the head of the investigation.
"In one opportune moment she ran out. She was no longer under his control."
Police admitted yesterday that they already questioned Priklopil in 1998, one of 1,000 owners of a white Mercedes van that a school friend of Ms Kampusch reported seeing her being pulled into.
He wasn't questioned further because of a lack of evidence to link him with the disappearance.
The house belonged to Priklopil's mother. She is also believed to have seen Ms Kampusch once, although she was apparently told a story to explain the girl's presence. Ms Kampusch was dressed normally at the time of her escape and, though incredibly pale from a lack of exposure to daylight, was not underweight or in poor physical health.
It is not yet known if she was physically or sexually abused.
Investigator Erich Zwettler said she reacted "calmly" to the news of the death of her captor. "He told her: 'They'll never get me alive'," said Mr Zwettler.
He said Priklopil was her only figure of attachment for years and that police psychologists were waiting for the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, where a hostage develops an emotional attachment to their captor, to emerge.
"You can take it that this will happen in this case," he said.