Sydney hostage confrontation ends peacefully after 12-hour standoff

Bomb-threat man who took 12-year-old daughter into Sydney law office is taken into custody A man who marched into a Sydney law office with his daughter and said he had a bomb in his backpack has been taken into custody after a 12-hour standoff with police . The man’s 12-year-old daughter was released and reunited with her family, New South Wales police said. She was distressed but otherwise unharmed, police said. Police did not immediately say whether explosives had been found in the man’s backpack. “Towards the latter part of the time we’ve been here, those negotiations have started to break down and then deteriorate to a stage where police have taken action to break into the premises and take a 52-year-old man into custody,” Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said. “He’s currently assisting police with their ongoing inquiries.” Police have not released the man’s name. Television footage had earlier shown the man looking from a second-floor window shirtless and wearing the same kind of wig as worn in Australian courts by judges and lawyers. At one point he spat on the wig. He had also swung a bottle like a hammer to smash a plate-sized hole in the office window and yelled through the hole. He threw the bottle, then a telephone handset, which was left dangling by its cord. Betty Hor said she was working at the reception desk when the man approached on Tuesday morning. She said he asked to see someone she had never heard of. The man went upstairs briefly then returned to the reception desk and repeated his request. She repeated that she had never heard of the man. She said he then threw a book on the desk and told her to call the unknown man and the state attorney general’s department and said: “Tell them I’ve got a bomb in my backpack.” Hor called the police as the man walked upstairs to a lawyer’s office with the girl, who called him dad. The standoff came a month after an extortionist broke into a Sydney home and fastened a fake bomb around the neck of a millionaire’s teenage daughter . She spent 10 hours with the device strapped to her before police determined it was harmless and freed her. A man has been arrested in the US in connection with the incident and is awaiting extradition. Australia guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.