A police handout picture of Natascha Kampusch. Kampusch, an Austrian teenager held captive for eight years after being kidnapped as a 10-year-old, has been found, police said, while her presumed abductor has committed suicide, resolving one of the country's longest-running mysteries. [AFP]

The disappearance of Natascha Kampusch at the age of 10 as she walked to school in 1998 remains one of Austria's most baffling crime mysteries.

Speaking about the moment the family was reunited, Kampusch's father, Ludwig Koch, told the Austrian daily Kurier: "She said: 'Dad, I love you.' And the next question was: 'Is my toy car still there?' It was Natascha's favourite toy, I never gave it away in all those years."

"I always put out of my mind the thought that she was dead."

He and her half-sister identified the 18-year-old on Wednesday and were joined by her mother on Thursday at the hotel where Kampusch is staying at with a policewoman and a psychologist.

She escaped on Wednesday while her kidnapper was distracted, police said. A man police believe to be her captor committed suicide by throwing himself under a train soon after.

"Her health is OK and mentally she also appears to be OK, at least in the eyes of a layman," police spokesman Armin Halm said.

But her father, who split from her mother before the kidnap, told the paper Natascha was "emaciated and has a very, very white skin and blotches all over her body", according to quotes released ahead of Friday's edition.

"I don't dare to think about where they come from," he said.

Adolf Brenner, the policeman who questioned her first on Wednesday, told local news agency APA she was forced to call her captor "master" in the first years of her ordeal.

The police spokesman said it was unclear whether Kampusch had been abused. Officers were due to interview her later on Thursday once DNA tests results confirmed her identity.

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