Kidnapper's friend met captive last month

AUSTRIA: A friend and former business partner of Austrian kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil has admitted meeting the teenager whom…

AUSTRIA: A friend and former business partner of Austrian kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil has admitted meeting the teenager whom Priklopil held captive for eight years before she escaped last Wednesday.

Minutes after the escape of 18-year-old Natascha Kampush, a panicked Wolfgang Priklopil called his friend, Ernst Holzapfel, and met him in a shopping centre. Shortly afterwards, Priklopil threw himself in front of an express train.

"I'm speechless, I never would have thought of him as a kidnapper. The entire time I never noticed anything . . . I never thought something so appalling could be possible," said Mr Holzapfel, reading a statement before the press in Vienna yesterday.

"I always thought that when you work for years with someone that you know them well. As a result, I'm even more shocked about the events."

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Mr Holzapfel, pale and shaking, with brown hair and a side-parting, said he "never noticed anything" strange about Priklopil, whom he met during an apprenticeship in Siemens in the 1980s.

Although the two men didn't socialise together, he said he never saw Priklopil with a girlfriend, so it was a surprise when Priklopil dropped by last month to borrow a trailer.

"He introduced a young woman as an acquaintance of his but named no names. I gave her my hand and she said a polite 'Hello'," he said.

"She gave a jolly, happy impression. I was very surprised and I couldn't work out if she was his girlfriend or just an acquaintance. Unfortunately I had very little time and said goodbye shortly afterwards."

He recognised the young woman from police photos after her escape, but said he would not comment on her current appearance.

Priklopil was a "friendly and dependable" friend and co-worker, someone who didn't like to attract attention and who was "thrifty but not mean". "He preferred to own little but that what he possessed was of good quality," he said.

The men worked as partners on a big property renovation from 1994 to 1997 and then saw each other less regularly in the following years.

Mr Holzapfel visited Priklopil's house several times in the 1990s and in recent years, to help renovate the roof and to borrow and return machinery. He was once in the garage and saw a door leading to a passage below where Natascha was locked up, but thought nothing of it.

The last time he heard from Priklopil was on Wednesday afternoon after Natascha's escape. "He seemed agitated. He said: 'Please pick me up. It's an emergency. Please come immediately'." They met at a shopping centre and drove to a carpark where Priklopil told him that he had driven away drunk from a police checkpoint.

"They'll take my driver's licence. It's terrible without a car. Then I can't visit my mother anymore," he said, according to Mr Holzapfel.

Mr Holzapfel said he had no doubts about this story and tried to calm his friend down and convince him to go to the police.

"He promised to do this and got out . . . because I knew him as a proper person I had no doubt that he would do this," said Mr Holzapfel.

Later that evening, as he went back to his car after work, he was approached by police officers who told him about Natascha and about his friend's suicide.

He went to a police station to identify Priklopil's body.

"I am still overwhelmed by the situation and shocked by the consequent events and huge media interest. I have to work through everything and then slowly come down," he said.

A team of psychologists and investigators continued their questioning of Natascha Kampush yesterday, while a police unit combed the house for other hidden cells.