Until this week, Austria's most notorious abduction scandal had been the
case of the Vienna schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped at the
age of 10 and held in a cellar beneath her captor's garage for eight years
before she escaped in August 2006.
And yesterday Austrians were making inevitable comparisons. Media reports
asked whether both the Kampusch and now the Fritzl case had exposed Austria
as a "look-away society", whose citizens preferred to ignore the possibility
of human suffering rather than investigate it.
"I was railing against the neighbours in the Kampusch case," confided one
businessman who lives near the Fritzl house. "Now I am in the same
situation."
Another Amstetten resident, 75-year-old Joachim Wasler, admitted there were
parallels. "It is like the Kampusch case but much worse," he said. However,
he added: "It is nothing to do with Austria as such. This kind of thing
could happen anywhere."
The Austrian daily newspaper Österreich disagreed: "The whole of Amstetten
should drown in shame," the paper wrote in an editorial, "The neighbours
have turned a blind eye." And Der Standard insisted: "The whole community
must ask itself what is really fundamentally going on."
Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped while walking to school in Vienna by an
acquaintance of her mother, a 44-year-old computer technician called
Wolfgang Priklopil. He imprisoned her in a cellar beneath the garage of his
suburban home on the outskirts of the city and held her there for eight
years. Ms Kampusch simply disappeared, and despite initially intensive
efforts by the Austrian police to find her, she only reappeared after
managing to flee her captor herself.
She walked into a neighbour's garden and managed to convince the occupants
of the truth of her story because her skin had turned a ghostly white after
years spent in captivity underground. Austrian police faced a barrage of
criticism over their handling of the Kampusch kidnapping. Witnesses
suggested that she could have been found and freed much earlier if officers
had conducted a more thorough investigation.
Yesterday, Ms Kampusch said she was keen to commiserate with Elisabeth
Fritzl and offer her any help she could.
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