ZAMBOANGA, Nov 28: Eighty-nine hostages walked free and their captors also got away on Wednesday as the government agreed terms to end a deadly revolt by Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines.

The captives were found unharmed on the outskirts of Zamboanga as seven army trucks brought 217 heavily armed followers of Nur Misuari back to a Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) enclave near this southern port city.

“It’s over,” Lieutenant General Roy Cimatu declared as the haggard-looking hostages streamed out of a residential compound in the village of Pasonanca to end their 24-hour ordeal.

The group, many of them barefoot and wearing only their night clothes, were tearfully reunited with their families at an airforce base here. One frail old man was taken out by soldiers on a stretcher, while the others sobbed and cried as they recalled their harrowing ordeal.

The government of President Gloria Arroyo, who had previously taken a hard line against hostage takers, agreed to grant the renegade MNLF members safe passage to end a revolt that claimed 27 lives in two days of fighting.

Asked what her government planned to do to the rebels, Arroyo said the issue was a “tactical matter” that would be left to the armed forces.

But the military would make sure such an incident “won’t happen again,” she told reporters in Manila.

The rebels seized 113 residents at gunpoint Tuesday, shortly after the military launched air strikes to dislodge them from Cabatangan, a hilltop government complex that overlooks this predominantly Christian city of 600,000 people.

Muslim government leaders held talks overnight and won a pledge that the gunmen would free their hostages unharmed in exchange for safe passage to the town of Panubigan, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of here.

The deal contained a provision for the handover of the gunmen’s weapons to Isnaji Alvarez, the acting governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

But the men, looking tired and subdued, still carried their assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars when they left the city for the town of Panubigan, where the MNLF maintains a camp.

“We are now happy. Everything is already peaceful,” Julhambri Misuari, a nephew of Misuari who led the attacks, told reporters as he boarded a truck that took him and his comrades away from the conflict.

“The government will look more kindly at the followers of people like Misuari,” said Arroyo’s national security adviser, Roilo Golez.

He said the gunmen had been taken to a far away place “where they would not be a cause of tension.”

Brigadier General Edilberto Adan, a military spokesman, said: “As of this time we will not talk of charges. The objective is to make Zamboanga city safe again.”

But legislators and other officials called on Arroyo to toughen its stance against Misuari’s followers, warning that the gunmen could stir up more trouble in the future.—AFP