The mother of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl who escaped more than eight years of captivity in 2006, has sent a letter of solidarity to the parents of Madeleine McCann, the four- year-old missing British girl, according to dpa. The German mass-circulation newspaper Bild said it would publish the open letter from Brigitta Sirny on Saturday to Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter went missing from a Portuguese holiday resort on May 3. "My girl Natascha was kidnapped and held by a criminal for 3,096 days," Sirny wrote. "I suffered endless hours of despair, hours in which I kept asking myself, Why? Why my child? Who would do this? Who would kidnap a helpless child? "Could I have stopped it? Did I lapse for a few minutes at the cost of years of my child's life?" In a release Friday, Bild quoted Sirny as saying that making the case public was the right thing to do "because the worst that could happen for a kidnapped child would be to be forgotten." Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped on her way to school on March 2, 1998 as a 10-year-old. She escaped on August 23 last year, more than eight years later. Her abductor killed himself the same day, before he could be arrested.
