A Vienna court is opening a hearing into whether the mother of the Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch was involved in her abduction.
Martin Wabl, a former judge and politician, has long claimed that Brigitte Sirny was behind her daughter's disappearance on her way to school in 1998.
Sirny secured a court injunction against Wabl several years ago, preventing him from repeating the allegations that first surfaced just days after Kampusch's abduction. She has repeatedly denied any involvement, as has Ludwig Koch, Kampusch's father.
Wabl, a former presidential candidate, has now won the right to review the previous court injunction, which he said was concluded without the possibility of interrogating the most important witness, Natascha Kampusch.
However, after her escape Kampusch told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard: "My mother told me that she'd had nothing to do with Mr Priklopil. I'm 100 percent certain that she's not lying."
Wabl claims Sirny knew her daughter's kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, who committed suicide after Natascha's escape, and helped in her disappearance to cover up sadomasochistic activities in which the girl had been involved.
Kampusch, 19, who after eight years in captivity escaped the clutches of Priklopil as he cleaned his car last summer, is expected to be called as a witness, as long as doctors find her to be in good health.
Other witnesses include Max Edelbacher, the former Vienna chief of police who led the initial hunt for Kampusch.
He has said that he believed Kampusch had been forced to have sex before her kidnapping, and that he had been "unhappy" about Natascha's parents.
He said that the discovery in Sirny's family photo albums of pictures of Natascha in "sexy poses" further raised suspicions. In one photograph, he said, Kampusch was almost naked, posing in boots, clutching a riding crop and wearing a crop top. In another she was lying almost naked on a bed, in a fake fur stole.
Another potential witness at the Gleisdorf court will be Thomas Vogel, a German who says he told the Austrian police days after Kampusch's escape about evidence "leading to the pedophile scene," including a "dungeon porn" film allegedly including images of Kampusch. A chief investigator has backed Vogel's claims. A further female witness whose identity is unknown claims to have seen Sirny and Priklopil together.
Wabl is renowned in Austria for what is seen as his somewhat obsessive interest in the so-called Natascha Case. When he first made the claims in 1998, he was arrested for abusing his authority and questioned by police. Wabl later offered his services to the Interior Ministry as an investigator in the case. His offer was not taken up.
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