IT PROMISED to be a routine diplomatic reception. By 8 p.m., several hundred guests at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima were sipping pisco sours the favourite local tipple - and crowding round the sushi buffet.
Suddenly a heavy explosion, possibly caused by a rocket hitting an outside wall, stopped the small talk. Moments later, heavy gunfire started up close to the marquee where guests had gathered to celebrate Emperor Akihito of Japan's birthday.
The guests dropped to the ground. For the next 40 minutes we lay terrified as heavily armed guerrillas stalked among us, brandishing automatic rifles pistols, shouting: "Don't lift your head or it'll be shot off."
The guerrillas, many in their early 20s, carried knapsacks filled with grenades. Their organisation - the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) - had been widely written off since its founder-leader Victor Polay was captured in early 1992.
But the storming of the ambassador's residence, involving about 30 guerrillas, has destroyed the assumption that the MRTA is no longer a security threat.
Peruvian security forces seemed ill-prepared for the attack. The embassy compound had been full of security guards but Mr Morihisa Aoki, the Japanese ambassador, said the guerrillas had clambered over a back wall, where no guards had been posted.
Police were yelling orders to the guerrillas from the other side of the compound wall, but their instructions were inaudible. The guerrillas retorted by shouting at the police to find a megaphone.
Later, when the guerrillas were preparing to release women hostages, and a handful of elderly men, police launched tear-gas canisters into the compound.
The guerrillas had gas masks, but we hostages choked and spluttered for half an hour.
Before I was released with the other women hostages I was able to talk for 15 minutes with the guerrilla leader, who called himself Comandante Huerta at 43, the oldest of the militants.
He emphasised the MRTA's concern for Peru's poor and talked out about what he described as the movement's "martyrs".
The operation's prime aim, he said, was to secure the release from prison of MRTA militants in exchange for hostages. If the authorities refused to accede to MRTA demands, "everyone inside this embassy will die," he warned.
Asked why the Japanese embassy had been targeted, Comandante Huerta called it an "extreme measure in protest at the constant interference of the Japanese government, which has supported neo-liberal economic policies and violations of human rights".
Agencies add: Mr Roger Church, the number two at the British embassy in Lima, is the only British official being held at the embassy. Mr Church, (50) and married with two teenage sons, has been serving in Peru since 1994 after previous postings to the Gulf, Germany, Ceylon and India.
Britain's ambassador to Peru, Mr John Illman (56), had attended the party but left shortly before the terrorists took over the building. A Foreign Office statement said: "We are very concerned about the situation in Lima and hope that the Peruvian authorities will be able to resolve it quickly and peacefully."
Two top US diplomats left the reception half an hour before the rebels seized it, the State Department said yesterday.
Spokesman Mr Nicholas Burns said the ambassador, Mr Dennis Jell, and his deputy chief of mission, who was not named, had been at the reception on Tuesday evening. "They left about half an hour before the terrorists took over the compound," he said.