AUSTRIA: DNA tests confirm Austrian kidnap girl's identity. Police release video of basement in which she lived for 8 years.

DNA analysis has confirmed that a young Austrian woman who escaped her kidnapper this week is Natascha Kampusch, who vanished in 1998 at the age of 10, police said on Friday (August 25, 2006). The end of Kampusch's eight-year ordeal has transfixed the nation and left police scrambling to fill in the blanks as details of one of Austria's most notorious and puzzling crimes emerged. "The profile of the girl who vanished eight years ago is a match," said Gerhard Lang, a senior Vienna police official, announcing the result of the DNA test. "The probability is one in 23 billion that it is not." "For us, that is proof," he told a packed news conference. Lang then described how Natascha managed to get away from her captor: "The car was parked in the garden and he told her should clean it with the vacuum cleaner. Whilst Natascha was cleaning he (her captor) he got a phone call. He could not it hear very well so he moved a few metres away. Then she realised that was her opportunity and she escaped from the garden." The head of the organised crime department for the Austrian federal police, Erich Zettler, explained that the questioning of the girl had to be interrupted for a while. "It is very hard for Natascha to go through all the questioning now and has been - by both her physician's and the psychologist's advise - interrupted until at least Monday. In the meantime we are concentrating on the investigation of the crime scene." Kampusch was held for most of the eight years in a small, windowless cell hidden beneath the garage of a house in a commuter town outside Vienna. Her alleged kidnapper committed suicide shortly after she escaped on Wednesday. Police said they were still investigating whether Kampusch's kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, had acted in his own.

ITN Source | August 25, 2006

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