8-year captive 'thought only of escape'

VIENNA, Austria — A young woman abducted 8 1/2 years ago told Austrian TV viewers Wednesday of her anger and frustration that she hadn't simply crossed the street to avoid her kidnapper or gone to school with her mother on the morning she was seized.

Repeatedly shutting her still-sensitive eyes against the glare of TV lights, Natascha Kampusch, now 18, recalled her first horrific minutes inside the dingy, windowless cell beneath her captor's garage where she was held for years.

"The first time I didn't see the cellar room at all because it was pitch black. No lamp was screwed in. He only brought that after several minutes or half an hour," Kampusch told public broadcaster ORF in a televised interview that gave Austrians their first glimpse of the young woman whose abduction has riveted a nation.

She recalled how she sometimes threw water bottles at the wall in frustration and despair and occasionally also pounded it with her fists.

"I was very distressed and very angry, and I was angry that I didn't cross to the other side of the street and that I didn't go to school with my mother. It was awful," Kampusch said.

Kampusch bolted to freedom Aug. 23 while her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was distracted by a cell phone call. The 44-year-old communications technician killed himself within hours of her escape by jumping in front of a commuter train.

The wheezing sound of a ventilator that pumped air into her windowless room was "unbearable," she said.

She said she would have "gone crazy" if Priklopil had not occasionally allowed her upstairs, although those trips did not start until six months after she was abducted from the street as a freckle-faced 10-year-old.

Earlier Wednesday, the weekly magazine News and the daily Kronen Zeitung published separate interviews in which Kampusch said she "thought only of escape" during her entire ordeal and had once tried to jump out of Priklopil's car.

When Priklopil took her out on errands, "he always wanted me to walk in front of him, not behind him," apparently to minimize the chances of her escaping, she said.

Kampusch told the newspaper how she had tried to leap from Priklopil's car, but he "held me back and then sped away."

She did not specify when that escape attempt occurred, saying only that she felt "it was much too risky" to try it again because she feared Priklopil would kill her if she failed.