Four German children were freed unharmed tonight after police stormed a house cellar where they had been held for more than five hours by a man armed with two knives.
Police commandos overpowered their Iranian captor and the four girls, the oldest of whom is 16, were led to safety.
Earlier the man had forced them off a bus he had commandeered and forced them into the cellar of a nearby house at about noon Irish time.
They were freed unharmed just after 5 p.m. in the north-west German town of Ennepetal, police spokesman Joerg Blaszyk said.
"The situation has ended without trouble. Police went in and the overwhelmed the man. I cannot comment at the moment on the state of the hostages," a police spokesman said, adding the man was alive.
The mother of one of the children who escaped from the bus said the man told them he wanted to bring his family to Germany from Iran.
The man took the four girls captive after commandeering the bus, which was filled with school children on their way home, said Ulrich Rungwerth of the North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Ministry.
Renate Schulte said her 16-year-old son, Marvin, who escaped after the man forced the bus driver to stop, told her that the man read a statement in the bus saying his children were in Iran and he wanted to be allowed to bring them to Germany.
The man then herded some of the children into the back of the bus and tied nine or 10 of them together by their belt buckles with a cord.
The man told the children on the bus to stay calm and said he wanted to talk to the German government, Marvin Schulte said.
"He didn't seem aggressive," the boy said. "He said we should stay quiet and he didn't want to harm us."