(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-11-29 18:50

MANILA -- A group of Filipino renegade officers and soldiers who staged a standoff with the government in the financial hub of Makati City surrendered to police after half day of confrontation.

An armed soldier guards the stairs leading from the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in Makati City, metro Manila, November 29, 2007. A group of Filipino renegade officers and soldiers who staged a standoff with the government in Makati surrendered to police after half day of confrontation.  [Agencies]

Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, a former navy officer who led a short-lived mutiny in 2003, also in Makati City, and an army officer who was involved in a coup plot last year, walked out of the luxury Peninsula Hotel to face throngs of soldiers and armored vehicles who appeared on the verge of a military assault on them.

They said they decided to come out of the hotel so as not to endanger the lives of civilians after government troops apparently began storming the hotel.

Police troopers fired tear gas into the hotel lobby while an armored vehicle entered the main entrance shortly before the renegades declared they would give up.

Trillanes earlier said he was ready to die and rejected a government ultimatum to surrender.

"Well they can try, they can do anything. I'm going to expect the worst from these people," he said.

He said the renegades themselves would not start violence as it was his "moral obligation as an elected senator".

Trillanes and his followers marched into the luxury hotel after walking out of a Makati courtroom during a trial for his suspected role in the 2003 mutiny.