Abducted woman flees from torture chamber

GERMAN police were yesterday holding a 30-year-old man over the kidnap of a woman who escaped a homemade torture chamber in Germany by jumping through a barbed wire covered window.

The Israeli 26-year-old had been apparently held captive in a soundproofed cell, made from a converted telephone booth installed in Thomas Fischer’s ground-floor apartment in Hamburg.

She had been handcuffed and kidnapped at gunpoint from her home in a suburb of the German city, 158 miles north-west of Berlin, on Friday evening.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Police believe she would have been held for up to several months but she managed to flee after two-and-a-half hours when her captor failed to lock the improvised chamber door.

Hands still bound, she managed to pull apart the barbed wire which zig-zagged the window and leapt to freedom.

Fischer, who is known to her, took chase but she outran him, fleeing to a friend’s home.

Police who stormed the fortified apartment found a pistol, hand grenade and surgical equipment, including a scalpel, syringes and gynaecological tools with which he had reportedly experimented with using a mannequin.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is thought the woman’s kidnapper had planned to hold her for some months – having stocked up with supplies which included timber, leading police to believe he intended to board up the windows and doors.

Investigators who are dismantling the apartment for evidence, also discovered more than 100 fire extinguishers which police suspect were being turned into bombs after Fischer’s hand grenade was found to contain a homemade, “highly explosive” substance, Mirko Streiber, a police spokesman, told the media.

Neighbours and local homes were evacuated amid fears the apartment was rigged to explode, with the intention that, once he had finished with his victim, he could destroy evidence and hide his crimes.

Fischer had apparently made the “bombs” using recipes he found on the internet.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Police said he and the young woman knew one another through a friend, but that there was “definitely no relationship”.

Sources said Fischer had become obsessed with “owning” her.

The Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper reported that Fisher had been investigated previously for assault and stalking. He has not spoken since his arrest, according to reports, and no charges have been released.

Shocked neighbours told reporters they believed he barricaded his windows to keep out intruders.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“He told us that he wanted to protect himself from burglars, because he had already been broken into three times,” a neighbour said yesterday.

A police spokesman said: “The whole two-roomed apartment was rigged up as one massive torture chamber, with this big old-fashioned telephone kiosk soundproofed as the cell for his victim.”

The police prosecutor said: “It is evident that the apartment was meant as a place of confinement for some time.”

It is understood police are also searching for an accomplice who may have helped Fischer move the 276-pound (125kg), eight-foot-tall (2.3-metre-tall) phone booth and timber beams into his flat.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The case which has rocked Germany, has drawn comparisons with that of Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive and abused in an elaborate basement cell for eight years after she was snatched as a child, while on her way to school in Vienna, Austria in 1998.

Related topics: