Teenager who held pupils captive, armed with a sword, taken into custody without anyone being harmed, say police

A group of children who were held hostage by a 17-year-old at a nursery school in eastern France have been released unharmed.

The teenager, who was armed with at least one sword, was detained by police just before 1pm local time after the arrival of a specialist unit of the national force, accompanied by two psychiatrists. He had taken 20 children hostage at the Charles Fourier pre-school in Besancon at 9am (8am GMT) but released most of them about an hour later.

Five or six children and the teacher were believed still to have been in the school when the officers entered. Masked gendarmes pointed their firearms at the windows and doors as they went inside.

"The hostage-taking is over", said Jean-Marc Magda, an aide to the Besancon mayor, adding that the teenager was in police custody inside the school. French television showed a wide-eyed girl being draped with a green blanket and carried away. Police and worried families had surrounded the school since early in the day.

The children held were aged between four and five. The hostage-taker did not threaten them and allowed them to go to the bathroom during the ordeal, said the French education minister, Luc Chatel, from the scene.. Magda said on BFM-TV that the children's families were being offered psychological and medical assistance.

Magda said the hostage-taker was known to suffer from depression. "He has personality problems. We have contacted his doctor," he said. "We have been in constant contact with him since the beginning."

The school is in Planoise, a neighbourhood of housing estates with a large immigrant population on the western edge of Besancon. Other classrooms in the nursery were evacuated but pupils were still inside the adjacent elementary school while the events unfolded. President Nicolas Sarkozy did not comment publicly about the hostage-taking.

When he was mayor of the north-west Paris suburb of Neuilly in 1993, Sarkozy negotiated the release of several children taken hostage by a hooded and armed man calling himself HB (Human Bomb) who demanded a 100m francs (£10m) ransom for their release.

The then mayor was seen carrying children from the school. The siege lasted 46 hours before a squad of armed police shot dead the hostage-taker, Eric Schmitt.