Austria kidnap girl mourns captor

No picture of Natascha Kampusch aged 18 has been released

An Austrian teenager recovering after spending eight years in an underground cell is grieving for her captor.

Natascha Kampusch, 18, said Wolfgang Priklopil was "part of my life, that's why in a certain way I'm mourning him".

He killed himself by jumping in front of a train after her escape last week. It is still unclear why he abducted her as she was on her way to school.

"Give me time until I can tell my story myself," Ms Kampusch said in her first statement read by her psychiatrist.

She said she understood the media "curiosity" about her life with the kidnapper, but insisted that she would not answer intimate questions.

"Maybe I'll tell a therapist one day or someone else when I feel the need to. Or maybe never. The intimacy only belongs to me."

Ms Kampusch said she and Priklopil had eaten meals and watched television together, and had jointly done the housework.

Priklopil "was not my lord, although he wanted to be - I was just as strong", she added.

"To give you a metaphor - he carried me in his arms but also trampled me underfoot."

She is at a secure location with psychological carers, and police say she has not asked to see her parents again after a brief reunion.

In her statement on Monday, she said she realised "how shocking and worrying" her experience must seem to people.

But she said she did not feel that Priklopil had robbed her of her childhood.

Together they had furnished her room "adequately" soon after he had abducted her, Ms Kampusch said.

She is reported to have wept inconsolably when she was told the man she had to call "master" was dead.

Mother frustrated

Police suspect she may have been suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome" - a condition where some abductees gradually begin to sympathise with their captors.

Her parents, who separated after her abduction, have complained that they have not been told where she is staying.

Her mother Brigitta Sirny has pleaded to be allowed to see her. She asked in a newspaper interview on Sunday: "Why can I not see my child?"

Wolfgang Priklopil was a 44-year-old telecoms technician

Austrian police officer Gerhard Lang said the police were not banning contact with Ms Kampusch.

He said she had voluntarily gone to a "safe place" to receive psychological care and protection.

Ms Kampusch, said to be pale and to weigh less than she did as a 10-year-old, managed to flee her abductor on Wednesday after he moved away to take a phone call as she vacuumed his car, it has emerged.

Priklopil threw himself under a train within hours of her escape.

It is not clear what the kidnapper's motives were and whether Natascha was sexually abused during her captivity.

Photos released by police show the underground hiding place in his house, in Strasshof village outside Vienna, where he had purportedly kept her.

The pictures show a small, cluttered, windowless room with wash basin, toilet, bed and cupboards and narrow concrete stairs leading up to a trapdoor.