GREECE: Greece's freed hijack hostages have portrayed their Albanian captors as bungling criminals only after money who were easily manipulated and armed with croissants, not dynamite.
The bus hostage siege ended peacefully yesterday when all 23 passengers were freed and police revealed the two hijackers had been bluffing when they threatened to blow up the bus.
Greek officials said training that security forces received in protecting last August's Athens Olympic Games and phone calls to the gunmen from their relatives urging them to give themselves up played key roles in ending the drama.
The hostages said the gunmen who kept them captive for 18 hours were angry young men who seemed bewildered when the hijack went wrong from the first seconds when the driver escaped, activating a secret switch installed for the Olympics that immobilised the vehicle.
The hostages said it became easier for them to convince the gunmen to free passengers in batches of two or three as the siege dragged on with no sign of authorities agreeing to a $1 million ransom demand.
"They were vulnerable. We could get around them," said Ms Stella Matara, who was among the last six hostages released.
Another hostage, Mr George Vassilas, said even when the gunmen fired shots to keep surrounding police at bay the hijackers assured passengers their anger was not directed at them.
"The hijackers kept saying to us that they would not hurt us, they didn't want to harm us," he said.
After the siege, which lasted from dawn on Wednesday until just after midnight yesterday morning, Greek police chief George Angelakos said the gunmen had no explosives despite telling hostages they had dynamite.
Their only weapons were hunting rifles.
"There were no explosives. They just claimed they had explosives to emphasise the fact that they could do harm," Mr Angelakos told reporters.
Ms Matara said once hostages realised the gunmen were bluffing about having a bag of explosives they said was dynamite, passengers relaxed, actively taking part in negotiations by putting pressure on the gunmen to release hostages.
"We told them that you already proved you are good people, release another hostage," Ms Matara said.
"As it turned out, the bag was filled with croissants, cigarettes, anything but explosives. How could they blow up the bus. Using cigarettes?
"Then they talked to their next of kin, and realised that everything was over. Their identity was known, so they decided to give themselves up."
During the siege, the gunmen made phone calls to Greek media saying they were Russians and wanted to fly to Moscow.
But Mr Angelakos said this was a ruse to try to disguise their identity and stop reprisals against their families.
Both gunmen were aged 24 and had lived in Greece for six years, coming to the country from Albania, police said. About a million of Greece's 11 million population are Albanian immigrants - Greece's biggest minority. Many came from the neighbouring nation to work on the Athens Olympics.
The successful end to the drama in which shots were fired when the bus was taken over on a road that was used as the route for the Olympics was a stunning victory for security forces trained during the games.