A German police SWAT team sneaked into the house where a knife-wielding man held four schoolgirls hostage, freeing the girls and apprehending the suspect after a five-hour standoff.
The SWAT team acted with caution on Tuesday because the man was known to have psychological problems and the red brick house in which he held the girls -- a 16-year-old and three 11-year-olds -- was owned by a hunter who had rifles and handguns he might have found and used, lead investigator Ulrich Kuhne said.
"Thank God, he did not use that opportunity," Kuhne said.
But the man did inflict a superficial knife wound on the 16-year-old girl's stomach before being captured by the SWAT team shortly after 6pm, Kuhne said.
Police earlier said the suspect, identified as a 50-year-old Iranian asylum-seeker who has been in Germany since the 1990s, was injured as he was overpowered, but Kuhne gave no further details.
Police captured the man after he had bound his four captives together to take them to the bathroom, Kuhne said.
The man had pulled the girls off a public bus he had commandeered and forced them into the basement of the home at about 1pm. The bus was packed with children on their way home from school in the town of Ennepetal, between the cities of Duesseldorf and Dortmund. The mother of one child said the man told them he wanted to bring his family to Germany from Iran.
Renate Schulte said her 16-year-old son, Marvin, who fled after the man forced the bus driver to stop, told her the man read a statement saying his children were in Iran and he wanted to be allowed to bring them to Germany.
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