Ex-kidnap girl 'sorry for captor'

Ms Kampusch has given few interviews

Austrian former kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch says her feelings of pity for her late captor have deepened in the year since she escaped from him.

"I feel more and more sorry for him," Ms Kampusch, 19, said in an interview with Austria's ORF television.

She was forced to live in a tiny basement cell for more than eight years, following her abduction in 1998.

Her 44-year-old captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, killed himself shortly after her escape last August.

"What he did to me has become more distant, [but] it does not fade away, it boils up again and again," Ms Kampusch said in the 50-minute ORF interview.

I don't give autographs - I'm not a superstar Natascha Kampusch

"I just try and handle these memories as well as I can, and try to work through them."

Looking calm, she described Mr Priklopil as a "poor soul - lost and misguided".

Privacy

The interview was filmed on a trip offered to Ms Kampusch by ORF to the Spanish city of Barcelona.

Ms Kampusch also said she had been catching up on her education and reintegrating with society.

She stressed the importance of privacy in her quest for inner peace.

"You will rarely, or even never, see me crying, sobbing or breaking down in public. I'll sort that out in private," she said.

She added that she wanted "her case to be taken seriously, and the events not swept under the carpet".

Ms Kampusch has given only a small number of interviews.

She was 10 when she was abducted, and escaped while her captor was making a phone call on 23 August last year.

Mr Priklopil had held Ms Kampusch in a windowless basement beneath his garage in a town near Vienna for eight-and-a-half years.

The communications technician committed suicide by jumping under a train after she escaped. He was secretly buried at a cemetery south of Vienna last September.