(Top) Children look out of the bus shortly after their kidnapper decided to end the 10-hour standoff in Manila on Wednesday. (Above) The day-care centre owner Jun Ducat. (AP)

Manila, March 28 (AP): A man who took a busload of children and teachers hostage from his day-care centre in Manila today freed them after a 10-hour standoff that he used to denounce corruption and demand better lives for impoverished children.

Clutching dolls, toys and backpacks, the children began filing off the bus shortly after 1100 GMT, as Jun Ducat had promised in a rambling message delivered via a loudspeaker hours earlier.

Ducat, a 56-year-old civil engineer who has staged other attention-grabbing stunts in the past, then put the pin back in a grenade, handed it to a provincial governor, Luis “Chavit” Singson, and surrendered as Singson held his arm.

Ducat, who received assurances that his students would get a good education, apologised to them and to police.

“Let the candles be a warning,” he said. “If the promises remain unfulfilled, you will see those candles again.”

Jubilant parents were quickly reunited with their children while Ducat was led to a waiting police car and driven away. “I accept that I should be jailed because what I did was against the law,” Ducat said in an interview shortly before the standoff ended.

White candles had been lit, in accordance with Ducat’s request, and placed in yellow cups lined up under the yellow police tape used to cordon off the area.

Ducat was disqualified as a congressional candidate in 2001 for unspecified reasons. He once protested high rice prices by personally pulling a wagon loaded with sacks of rice about 100 km to Manila. In 1998, he climbed a tower to protest against the candidacy of a politician who he said was not a real Filipino citizen.

“I know him as a very, very passionate individual who has his own kind of thinking on the solutions to our problems,” Manila mayor Lito Atienza said. “But we cannot agree with his ways.”

The incident virtually shut down the capital’s main office building, drew thousands of onlookers and was beamed live around the world.

Ducat founded the 145-student Musmos Day Care Center about four years ago in Manila’s Tondo slum district. He chartered the tourist bus for a field trip marking the end of the school year.

Instead, he and at least one other hostage-taker had the driver take them to city hall, where they taped a handwritten sheet of paper to the windshield, saying they were holding 32 children and two teachers and were armed with two grenades, an Uzi assault rifle and a .45-calibre pistol.

The driver was released soon afterward.