Austrian girl escaped while vacuuming car

Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl who had been held captive for eight years, escaped from her abductor when he took a phone call while she was vacuuming his car, Austrian police said yesterday.

The end of Ms Kampusch's eight-year ordeal has transfixed the nation and left police scrambling to fill in the blanks.

Ms Kampusch, who was abducted as a 10-year old on her way to school, spent the past eight years in a small, windowless cell underneath a garage in the house of 44-year-old Wolfgang Priklopil in a commuter town near Vienna.

Her abductor committed suicide shortly after she escaped on Wednesday.

"He told her to vacuum the car. Then he got a phone call and stepped a few metres away to avoid the noise," Gerhard Lang, a senior federal police officer, told a news conference in the Austrian capital.

"Natascha took advantage of the situation and fled." When he realised the girl had escaped, Priklopil sped to Vienna in his red sports car. He abandoned his car, a BMW, in a shopping mall's parking garage before throwing himself in front of a train.

His mutilated body was later identified by the BMW's keys in his pocket and the clothes he was wearing.

Police said they would give Ms Kampusch a break until Monday before they continued interviewing her.

"Being questioned is a very agonising procedure for Natascha," said Erich Zwettler, a Vienna police investigator.

Experts said the young woman had "Stockholm Syndrome" - a psychological condition in which long-held captives begin to identify with their captors.

"If you cannot cope with the fear for your life you start to identify with your aggressor, you try to understand what happens inside (the mind of) your captor, what is driving him," said Reinhard Haller, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Innsbruck.

Ms Kampusch's mother told a local newspaper that her daughter weighed only 42 kg after her escape, less than she did before her disappearance despite growing to 1.6 metres in height from 1.45.

Ms Kampusch had to address her captor as "master". After spending the first years being locked up in her six-square-metres cell, the young woman had started helping him keep up the house and with the gardening. She was also allowed to make occasional outings to the village, police said.

Stockholm Syndrome

• In 1973, a Swedish armed robber stole the world's attention and the hearts of the bank workers he held hostage for six days in a drama that spawned the concept of the "Stockholm Syndrome".

• It also led psychologists to identify the phenomenon in which hostages bond with their captors. Despite threats by robber Jan "Janne" Olsson to kill them, the four workers held in the bank vault began to side with him and criticise those trying to rescue them.

• The drama began on August 23, 1973, when Olsson walked into a Kreditbanken bank in central Stockholm and pulled out a machine gun. Inside the bank, Olsson made several threats to kill the hostages and made them put nooses around their necks from time to time.

• However, after a few days in the vault some of the hostages started to criticise the police for their hostility and reject the efforts to free them.

• This reaction was dubbed the "Stockholm Syndrome", which psychologists have described as a defence mechanism which captives consciously or unconsciously use to try to cope with the situation and avoid harm.

The whole concept of "Stockholm Syndrome" was a means for the police to explain to the public why the hostages gave a totally different version of the story than the police.