VIENNA: An Austrian teenager kidnapped eight years ago as a 10-year-old was found on Thursday, while her presumed abductor has committed suicide, resolving one of the country’s longest-running mysteries.
Austrian police said a young woman found wandering in a Vienna suburb the day before had been identified by her family as the kidnapped girl.
The young woman identified herself as Natascha Kampusch, whose abduction in 1998 while she was on the way to school caused national anguish and one of the most intensive police investigations in Austrian history.
Her presumed captor, 44-year-old telecommunications technician Wolfgang Priklopil, apparently committed suicide late Wednesday by throwing himself under a train in Vienna.
The Austrian news agency APA said a second person could have been involved in the kidnapping but police refused to comment.
Federal police official Gerhard Lang said in a television interview said Kampusch had run away when Priklopil was making a phone call.
“In principle, she was locked up day and night,” Lang said but was “let out for different chores in the house” and was vacuuming the car Wednesday when Priklopil moved “off to the side for a few minutes in order to talk undisturbed because of the noise from the vacuum cleaner.”
“Natascha used this headstart of a few metres to leave the house and run away a few hundred metres so that the suspect couldn’t follow her,” Lang said.
Kampusch’s separated parents Brigitta Sirny and Ludwig Koch recognized their daughter partly because of a distinctive scar, but police are awaiting the results of DNA tests for additional confirmation of her identity.—AFP
VIENNA: An Austrian teenager kidnapped eight years ago as a 10-year-old was found on Thursday, while her presumed abductor has committed suicide, resolving one of the country’s longest-running mysteries.
