ATHENS, 17 December 2004 — Two Albanians appeared before a Greek magistrate yesterday following their arrest for holding 23 hostages on a bus for 18 hours in an internationally televised drama that ended peacefully in the early morning hours.
Dozens of Greeks gathered outside Athens’ police headquarters and jeered as the hostage-takers, both 24-year-old immigrants and wearing handcuffs, were taken to a prosecutor and charged with multiple counts of kidnapping and attempted murder. Both men are housepainters who have lived in Greece for the past seven years.
The two men are accused of using shotguns to hijack a passenger bus with 23 passengers on board shortly before dawn Wednesday. They released their last hostages after midnight and then turned themselves in to police after receiving phone calls from their relatives urging them to give up. Before their surrender they had carried handguns and pretended to have explosives to blow up the bus unless they received a ransom of 1 million euros and a driver by dawn yesterday.
Police said the hostage drama was resolved after involving the hijackers’ relatives, following tactics learned during training to protect last August’s Olympic Games.
Hostages described the gunmen as angry individuals whose sole motive was money. The hijackers had also told police they wanted to be taken to Athens airport and be flown to Russia.
The hijackers initially claimed to be Russian, but reports said both men were Albanians with criminal records in Greece. Officials believe the men tried to hide their identities by pretending to be of a different nationality. “There were no explosives. They just claimed they had explosives to emphasize the fact that they could do harm,” Greek police chief Giorgos Angelakos told reporters.
“Obviously it was the money they were after. They wanted to go to Albania but they said they wanted to go to the airport to blow smoke in our faces.”
The two men had seized control of the intercity bus at 5:50 a.m. Wednesday about 20 kilometers east of the city center. The driver, a ticket inspector, and a passenger escaped, almost immediately.
Police said they believe the driver’s quick thinking in jumping from the bus with its keys before the hijackers could stop him prevented what could have been an even more serious situation. His action, learned from training he had received as an Olympic Games driver, ensured the bus was immobilized, allowing police to throw a cordon around it.
The gunmen began releasing hostages in the early afternoon and negotiations continued throughout the day with hostages being released in groups of two and three until only six were left in the bus. At one point, the gunmen set an 8 a.m. (0600 GMT) yesterday deadline for their demands to be met and said they would not release any more hostages. However, they then changed their minds after phone calls from their relatives and let the remaining hostages go hours before reaching the deadline.
Seconds later the gunmen turned themselves in by throwing away their weapons. “We are very proud of the actions of the Greek police and that the training for the Olympics did not go to waste,” Public Order Minister Georgos Voulgarakis told journalists.
