By RIA Novosti
Moscow : Armed bank robbers, who held 30 people hostage in a 29-hour standoff, were captured by police and their captives freed unharmed in central Venezuela, national media reported late Tuesday.
The bank in the town of Altagracia de Orituco was surrounded by police following a bungled raid by armed gunmen on Monday morning. During negotiations the robbers, in their twenties, demanded they be allowed to leave in an ambulance together with five hostages.
The robbers were provided with an ambulance to make their getaway, but the men surrendered to police releasing the remaining five hostages, when their vehicle was stopped at a road block set up on a highway east of Caracas.
The incident took place in a branch of Banco Provincial, which is a subsidiary of Spain’s Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria.