Girl saved from dad who took her hostage

Bomb-threat man who took 12-year-old daughter into Sydney law office is taken into custody after 12-hour standoff ends

Bomb-threat man who took 12-year-old daughter into Sydney law office is taken into custody after 12-hour standoff ends

A man who marched into a Sydney law office with his daughter and said he had a bomb in his backpack has been taken into custody after a 12-hour standoff with police. The man's 12-year-old daughter was released and reunited with her family, New South Wales police said.


Calm after the storm: The accused is escorted by authorities after
he claimed to have a bomb in his backpack. During the stand-off he was
seen wearing a wig similar to those worn by judges and also spat on it.
Pics/AFP, Getty Images

She was distressed but otherwise unharmed, police said. Police did not immediately say whether explosives had been found in the man's backpack. "Towards the latter part of the time we've been here, those negotiations have started to break down and then deteriorate to a stage where police have taken action to break into the premises and take a 52-year-old man into custody," Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said. "He's currently assisting police with their ongoing inquiries."

Police have not released the man's name. The man looking from a second-floor window shirtless was wearing the same kind of wig as worn in Australian courts by judges and lawyers. At one point he spat on the wig.
He had also swung a bottle like a hammer to smash a plate-sized hole in the office window and yelled through the hole. He threw the bottle, then a telephone handset, which was left dangling by its cord.

Betty Hor said she was working at the reception desk when the man approached her yesterday morning.
She said he asked to see someone she had never heard of. The man went upstairs briefly then returned to the reception desk and repeated his request. She repeated that she had never heard of the man.

She said he then threw a book on the desk and told her to call the unknown man and the state attorney general's department and said, "Tell them I've got a bomb in my backpack." Hor called the police as the man walked upstairs to a lawyer's office with the girl, who called him dad.

Bomb threats
The standoff came a month after an extortionist broke into a home and fastened a fake bomb around the neck of a milliionaire's daughter. She spent 10 hours cops determined it was harmless and freed her.