Spanish School Hostage Drama Ends

Police captured an armed man who held 25 children hostage at a school near Barcelona for at least two hours Monday, officials said. None of the 12-year-old students he had held captive was hurt.

The man, who had a knife, released 21 of the captives in two groups, and about 45 minutes later the government said he had been detained.

It was not immediately clear if police stormed the school or the assailant surrendered.

Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes, speaking in the central city of Guadalajara, confirmed the arrest and said the hostage-taker was a former pupil of the school.

As a car left the schoolyard, apparently taking the alleged assailant to a police station, a crowd swarmed around it and many people screamed insults.

Throughout the nearly four-hour crisis it was believed the suspect was an adult but reports surfacing as it ended said he was a minor.

The Interior Ministry office in Barcelona said the assailant had a knife, and that the motive appeared to be money. It could not confirm news reports that the man was demanding $1 million.

One unidentified boy who was evacuated from the school described how teachers rushed his and other classes out of the building, through the cafeteria and out onto the playground.

"They told us some man had slipped into the school," the boy told Spanish national radio. "I was scared."

A teacher who identified herself only as Nuria said the assailant rang the doorbell at the school as if he was one of the parents coming to collect his children and was let in.

A ministry spokesman said the area around the school had been cordoned off. The rest of the school has been evacuated, town hall said.

Sixteen students were released about two hours after the hostage-taking began, a town hall official and a Spanish Interior Ministry official said.

Shortly thereafter, another five students were freed, an official at the school said.

Spanish television showed footage of a crowd of hundreds of parents and other people standing behind the police lines in Hospitalet de Llobregat, an industrial town just south of Barcelona

Ambulance crews were in the area to help parents and children in distress.

There have been several school hostage-takings in recent years in Europe.

A masked man calling himself the Human Bomb stormed a nursery school west of Paris in 1993, taking 21 children hostage, and was killed two days later in a police raid.

In 2000, a man took 45 children and five teachers hostage for 30 hours in Luxembourg. He was captured and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

And in October, a teenager in Waiblingen, Germany held four youngsters hostage at a school for seven hours before surrendering to police. No children were hurt.