Austria ? A teenager who escaped a year ago after being kept prisoner for more than eight years in a dingy cell said Monday she considered her captor a “poor soul” and once told him that one day she would dance on his grave.

Natascha Kampusch was 10 years old when she was kidnapped in Vienna on her way to school on March 2, 1998. She spent the next 8 1/2 years at the mercy of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, who largely confined her to a tiny underground dungeon in his home in the Vienna suburb of Strasshof.

The 44-year-old communications technician committed suicide within hours of Kampusch’s dramatic escape on Aug. 23, 2006, which marked the end of one of Austria’s greatest criminal mysteries.

“All I can say is that, bit by bit, I feel more sorry for him,” Kampusch, now 19, said in a 50-minute documentary aired on Austrian television Monday night to mark her first year of freedom.