Kampusch tells of captor’s ‘sick love’ in new autobiography

Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian who was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held captive for eight and a half years, tells of her captor’s “sick love” in an autobiography which goes on sale this week.

Wolfgang Priklopil, who killed himself when Ms Kampusch finally escaped in 2006, subjected his terrified young victim to horrific physical and mental abuse during her long years of incarceration in a tiny cellar in his home in a quiet suburb of Vienna.

But in her 284-page autobiography entitled 3,096 Days, which the now 22-year-old Ms Kampusch co-wrote with two journalists, she says he seemed to be searching for something more: “The man who beat me, locked me in his cellar and let me almost starve to death, wanted to be cuddled.”

Mr Priklopil “wanted to have someone for whom he was the most important being in the whole world. He seemed not to know any other way of doing this but by kidnapping a shy 10-year-old girl,” Ms Kampusch writes.

The book officially went on sale yesterday and the publishers, List, have given it an initial run of 50,000 copies.

Extracts of the book have been published in advance in the Austrian press, where she describes her “pyschological prison” in which her captor routinely beat and humiliated her.

“He did it on a number of occasions, he threw me naked out of the door of the house and said: ‘Go on, run! See how far you get!’.”

Mr Priklopil forced Ms Kampusch to be his slave and shaved her head so that she would not be recognised on the very rare occasions later on when she was allowed to leave her prison.

He then renamed her Bibiana when she was 11 after a fourth century Roman virgin and saint.