ALTAGRACIA DE ORITUCO, Venezuela — Gunmen who held more than 30 hostages inside a bank for more than 24 hours fled in an ambulance and surrendered Tuesday along a road, freeing their last five captives.
The gunmen first let three hostages go and then negotiated with police while holding on to the last two, Guarico state Gov. Eduardo Manuitt said. They eventually turned over their guns and a grenade, and then were ordered to the ground as police arrested them, Manuitt said.
The arrests ended an ordeal that began Monday morning with 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.
In the final hours, some hostages inside the bank held up signs in the windows with desperate pleas for help and used cellphones to call their relatives.
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 hostage, Vanessa Saavedra, spoke quietly and haltingly to Colombia’s Caracol Radio by cellphone from inside the bank before leaving with the gunmen. “We don’t want them to shoot,” she said. “We don’t want them to open fire. Please.”
Saavedra’s mother, Jasmin Gonzalez, said her daughter — a 25-year-old teller — volunteered to leave with the gunmen.
“She’s very brave. I know she’s going to come out of this fine,” Gonzalez said through tears.
It was not immediately known how many hostages were freed as relatives and onlookers massed at the front door of the bank, and some were led to waiting ambulances. Bank executive Leon Enrique Cottin said earlier Tuesday that 33 hostages were held captive, but Manuitt said after the siege that nearly 40 hostages were freed at the bank.
Those freed were believed to include a 2- week-old infant, at least three other children younger than 10, and a woman eight months pregnant. She was wheeled out on a stretcher.
The four gunmen were in the bank Monday morning when a uniformed police officer pulled up to use the cash machine and surprised the would-be robbers, prompting the standoff, said Amanda Saldivia, a reporter for the local Guarana Radio FM.
