VIENNA (Reuters) - An Austrian girl held captive for eight years told on Wednesday how the thought of escaping kept her alive, but that she feared fleeing might provoke her kidnapper into killing her and others in a murder spree.

For the first time since her dash to freedom two weeks ago, 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch spoke about the years of loneliness, hunger and agony she spent in a windowless cell beneath the garage of Wolfgang Priklopil's house near Vienna.

"I promised myself I would grow older, stronger and sturdier to be able to break free one day," Kampusch said in her first television interview, looking fragile but composed and confident despite her ordeal and the subsequent media frenzy.

"I made a deal with myself that the Natascha of the future would come back to free that little 12-year-old girl," the young woman with a bright smile and baby blue eyes said in the Austrian Television (ORF) interview, recorded on Tuesday.

Priklopil locked Kampusch in the 6 square meter (65 sq ft) cell in the sedate commuter town of Strasshof, 25 km (15 miles) outside the capital, after abducting her at the age of 10 on her way to school in 1998.

Kampusch recalled her horror when Priklopil made her enter for the first time the cell that would be her home for years.

"It felt very claustrophobic in that small room," said Kampusch, who was short of breath and suffering from a cold.

"I threw water bottles against the walls or banged against them with my fists so that maybe someone could hear me."

Source: Reuters