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Short Drive Ends Long Hostage Standoff In Venezuela

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By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, The Associated Press

Published: January 30, 2008

ALTAGRACIA DE ORITUCO, Venezuela - Police let four gunmen get away in an ambulance after a more than 24-hour hostage standoff at a bank, but the fugitives soon found there was no escape.

Followed by a helicopter, the gunmen and five hostages they brought along were tracked down by police who stopped the ambulance on a roadside. First, the men let three hostages go. Then, after a bit of negotiating, they tossed down their guns, freed their last two captives and stepped out.

"They're turning themselves in," Guarico state Gov. Eduardo Manuitt said excitedly, narrating the scene on television by phone as he followed along with police. The men were ordered to the ground as police arrested them.

"The hostages are free," Manuitt said. "This nightmare is over."

The arrests meant freedom for the last of the more than 30 hostages whose ordeal began Monday morning during a botched bank robbery in this town southeast of Caracas. The hostage standoff at the Banco Provincial branch was the longest in at least a decade in Venezuela.

As the standoff dragged on, the gunmen accepted a package with diapers and a bottle for a 2-week-old baby who was among the captives. In the final hours, some hostages inside the bank held up signs in the windows with desperate pleas for help and used cell phones to call their relatives.

Under the deal with police, the gunmen were permitted to leave with five hostages who agreed to accompany them, freeing the rest of the captives at the bank. Police allowed the gunmen to flee because "they threatened to start killing the hostages in 20 minutes," Manuitt said.

One of the hostages who later left with the gunmen, Vanessa Saavedra, 25, spoke to Colombia's Caracol Radio by cell phone from inside the bank, saying: "We don't want them to open fire. Please."

Saavedra's mother, Jasmin Gonzalez, said that her daughter, a bank teller, volunteered to leave with the gunmen.

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