Peruvian rebels who held 72 hostages for four months had demanded freedom for U.S. citizen Lori Berenson as a way of winning over American public opinion, a newspaper said Sunday.
Before a military raid ended the 126-day siege, the Tupac Amaru guerrillas had reduced their demands to freedom for 20 rebels and Berenson, papers reported.
Citing a hostage source, the newspaper Expreso said Berenson, 28, a New Yorker sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 for aiding a Tupac Amaru bombing plot, was specifically included in the list as a way of swaying U.S. public opinion.
MRTA commander Nestor Cerpa grew overly confident in the last days of negotiations and was convinced that he was about to win the release of some of his jailed comrades, said the daily La Republica.
“Cerpa said that he had won the upper hand over the government,” La Republica quoted a source close to negotiations as saying. “He was saying that everything would turn out all right and that there would be no deaths.”
