A tense 18-hour hostage drama in an Athens suburb ended without casualties on Wednesday night when two men who had hijacked a bus and threatened to blow it up surrendered to the police.
The men, identified as Albanians, left the bus shortly after midnight with their hands on their heads after throwing shotguns out of the door. They had demanded a ransom of €1-million and safe passage to Russia, but apparently caved in after lengthy negotiations.
Six hostages who had remained on the bus to the end walked away unharmed.
The sudden resolution came as a surprise, as earlier one of the hijackers had set a dawn deadline for the ransom and vowed to blow up the bus if the money was not delivered. On at least one occasion the men fired shots from a bus window.
Yet police said later that the hijackers were bluffing, as they did not have any explosives on board.
The pair seized the bus in Geraka, in the east of the city, at dawn on Wednesday. In the confusion the bus’s original driver, Constantine Mitsou, managed to escape with the keys in his pocket. The police praised his foresight and said that, had he left the keys behind, it could have created a far more serious situation.
The coach’s ticket collector and a female passenger also fled through the bus’s back door while the gunmen scrambled to take control of the vehicle as it made its way into Athens from Marathon.
The immobilised vehicle was quickly surrounded and a trickle of hostages emerged through the day. By dusk, 17 of 23 original passengers had been released, leaving six on board through the final evening hours.
Speaking on a cellphone to a Greek television station, one of the hijackers, who identified himself as Hassan, said: ”I will wait until 8am when the banks open and they bring me a driver and the money. If they don’t, I will light the fuse.”
But about four hours later, and after lengthy negotiations, the bus doors suddenly opened and the remaining captives walked free.
The hijackers followed, and the police quickly searched the stricken bus.
”There were no explosives,” said police chief George Angelakos. ”They just claimed they had explosives to emphasise the fact that they could do harm.”
Officials admitted it is a mystery why the two men, believed by Athens’s prosecutor’s office to be Albanians with lengthy criminal records in Greece, wanted to go to Russia. Angelakos said it is possible they wanted to go back to Albania and were trying to put the authorities off the scent.
At first they claimed to be Russian, but officials speculated that they were trying to conceal their real identities.
This is the fourth time a bus has been hijacked in Greece in recent years. Two hijackings by Albanians five years ago ended with the hostage-takers being killed by police.
About a million of Greece’s 11-million population are Albanian immigrants or of recent Albanian descent: they form Greece’s biggest minority group.
There was speculation that the kidnappers might have been inspired by the recent release of the Greek film Hostage, which records a similar incident in 1999.
”My hope, of course, is that this has not been inspired by the film,” said its Anglo-Greek director, Constantine Giannaris.
The hijacking was the first test for the Greek police of the intensive training they underwent to deal with such situations during the Olympics in August. — Guardian Unlimited Â