Pakistan school siege ends peacefully

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- A group of gunmen Monday released at least 30 students and teachers who had been held for several hours inside a primary school in northwest Pakistan, according to Pakistani officials and local police.

The hostages were unharmed, and the hostage-takers were handed over to the custody of tribal elders who had been helping police negotiate an end to the standoff, the officials and police said.

The tribal leaders later released the gunmen. Police said the kidnappers will not be held or charged for their actions, and were set free after giving up their weapons.

Before storming the school, the hostage-takers had seized a health official in the nearby town of Karak in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, Pakistani Interior Minister Nisar Memon told CNN.

He stressed that the gunmen are local criminals -- not members of the Taliban or al Qaeda militant groups -- who carry out such kidnappings for ransom payments.

Police confronted the kidnappers and engaged them in a firefight, killing one, Memon said.

The remaining four to seven kidnappers released the health official and fled to the neighboring town of Bannu, pursued by police, the minister said.

The assailants took refuge in the primary school and held the hostages. Memon would not give an exact number of hostages, but local police said somewhere between 24 and 30 students were inside at the time.

Early reports said between 200 and 250 students and teachers were being held, but police said most of those people were able to leave the building during the standoff.

The assailants were handed over to a loya jirga because tribal courts have more jurisdiction in this region of Pakistan, Pakistani Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said.

Karak and Bannu are about 75 miles (123 km) south of Peshawar near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

Speaking at a news conference in London, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called the situation a "desperate" act.

"These were extremists who were being chased, actually, and they took refuge in the school," Musharraf said at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"So they didn't go really to take the children as hostage. It was incidental that they entered the school to hide themselves but in the process then to hide, they took those students hostage."

He and Brown hailed the reports that the children were released.

Musharraf accused the suspects of "(turning) their guns on ... the government personalities" in Pakistan by abducting the local health official.

"They want to disrupt the democratic process and then this act of going into the school and running was again a desperate act maybe to take away attention from the military operation," Musharraf said. "We'll keep going strong on the side of acting against the terrorists." E-mail to a friend

CNN's Zein Basravi, Thomas Evans and Jennifer Eccleston in Islamabad contributed to this report

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