VIENNA - A lawyer says Austrian authorities have rejected a compensation claim from a woman who was held captive for 8 1/2 years by a man who tormented her both physically and verbally and locked her in a dungeon.

Natascha Kampusch was snatched off a Vienna street when she was 10 and held prisoner until she fled in August 2006. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, committed suicide within hours of her escape.

Kampusch and others claim authorities didn't properly handle the probe into her disappearance.

Lawyer Gerald Ganzger said Tuesday that Kampusch would have used the compensation for charity projects.

In an account of her captivity published last year, Kampusch said she was repeatedly beaten, starved and forced to do housework half-naked at the mercy of a paranoid man who admired Hitler and wanted her to call him "maestro" and "my lord."