Malaysian Children Safe after Hostage-Taker Shot
إقرأ هذا الخبر بالعربيةMalaysian police on Thursday shot in the head a man who took 30 pre-school children and four teachers hostage at a kindergarten, ending a dramatic seven-hour standoff.
Authorities said all the children and their teachers were rescued unharmed after a sharpshooter ended the crisis in southern Malaysia with a single shot after a team of elite police stormed the building.
"We have ended the hostage taking. The children and teachers are safe. The hostage taker armed with a hammer and machete has been taken to a local hospital," a police official said on condition of anonymity.
Witnesses said the children were calm and showed no fear as they emerged from the building, singing songs led by their teachers and walking into the waiting arms of their cheering parents who hugged them tightly.
But many looked tired as they had been without food and water during their ordeal.
Johor deputy police Chief Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman told reporters that the hostage-taker was alive but in a critical condition.
The children and teachers have been taken for medical checks at the hospital in Muar town, in southern Johor state which borders Singapore.
At the hospital, the father of one of the children who was taken hostage, 34-year-old Tan Teck Hock, said he was overjoyed to be reunited with his son.
"It is such a big relief. My wife and I thank the police for their efforts to protect my little five year-old boy," he told Agence France Presse.
Witnesses said some 1,000 onlookers and nearby residents who spent hours following the drama clapped in unison to thank the police for their successful operation.
Heavily armed police had surrounded the two-storey bungalow that houses the kindergarten and tried to coax the hostage-taker to free the children.
But they took action after numerous attempts to secure surrender -- from police negotiators, a local psychiatrist, and desperate family members -- all failed.
Personnel from the elite Special Action Unit -- trained for anti-terror operations and drafted down from the capital Kuala Lumpur to assist in the hostage crisis -- stormed the kindergarten and took the man down.
Muar was also the scene in March last year of another kindergarten siege when a man armed with a hammer barged into a school and bludgeoned three six-year-old who were left with head injuries.
Some 20 children at the school were eating breakfast when that attack happened. The 45-year-old kindergarten operator was also injured in the incident.
The New Straits Times newspaper said that the same man was responsible for both the March incident and the current hostage situation but police were not immediately able to confirm the report.
The Star newspaper said the man had told police negotiators to give him a gun or he would kill the children.
Frustrated after hours of tense waiting, family members began shouting over the fence of the compound, appealing for the man to surrender.