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A Teenager who praised the 11 September terror attacks on the United States hijacked a German city bus with 19 people on board today and held them for almost seven hours.
He was arrested when police commandos stormed the bus after he had released the last of his hostages on an autobahn.
The 17-year-old, from Lebanon, led police on a cross-country chase from Bremen before the hostages’ ordeal ended 75 miles away, near Hanover.
The bus was stormed and the teenager arrested on a six-lane motorway south of Hanover, police spokesman Walter Wallott said.
No shots were fired during the storming, and none of the hostages nor the gunman was injured during the odyssey, police said.
Bremen’s top security official, Kuno Boese, said the youth had written a letter to his parents on Thursday praising the 11 September suicide hijackers.
"The crime has a radical Islamic motive," Mr Boese said.
Police said the gunman asked for food, water, a mobile phone and a fresh bus driver to replace the "psychologically shaky" driver on board. He also demanded to talk to Bremen mayor Henning Scherf, police spokesman Ronald Walter said, but the mayor’s office said he never did.
The bus driver radioed a distress call to police when the gunman hijacked the bus around 9:30am in the northern city of Bremen. There were 18 passengers, including children, on board at the time, police said.
"I’m on my way to Hanover. A man with a gun is on board," the 35-year-old driver told the bus company by radio.
After about two hours, the hijacker stopped the bus on the way south of Hanover, 75 miles from Bremen, where police cars and heavily armed commandos closed off both directions in the midst of the rush hour.
Before police moved to end the stand-off,
the man gradually released ten hostages. Three had been freed or escaped
at the start of the hijacking.
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