Woman Surrenders After 23-Hour Standoff at U.N. : Protest: Daughter of a Nobel laureate threatened to set herself afire. The Californian was opposing the use of American taxes to support Gulf War.

A woman who said she was protesting the use of taxes to support war surrendered Sunday, one day after dousing her body with gasoline and threatening to set herself on fire in front of the United Nations.

Linne Gunther, 41, of San Lorenzo, Calif., threw several large lighters out the door of a white van parked in front of the United Nations before emerging Sunday morning after a 23-hour standoff.

Gunther, who is the daughter of Owen Chamberlain, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist turned peace activist, put her hands up and walked stiffly with police into the U.N. Secretariat building before being taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital.

“We believed she was serious,” said Detective Anton Petrak, one of the police negotiators. “She was repeatedly dousing herself with gasoline throughout the night and she was holding a cigarette lighter in each hand.”

Chief of Patrol Mario Selvaggi said she would be charged with attempted arson, reckless endangerment and possession of an incendiary device. Police removed three gallon cans of gasoline from her van.

Gunther drove the wrong way up 1st Avenue and into the U.N.’s circular driveway Saturday morning, nearly crashing into a guard.

She got out, poured gasoline over herself and climbed back in, locking the doors and threatening to ignite herself, said police Sgt. Norris Hollomon. She hung a sign in the windshield claiming she had explosives.

She told police she was protesting American taxes being used to pay for the Persian Gulf War.

Police negotiators covered by silver heat-retardant suits surrounded the van and attempted to talk her out. Several emergency vehicles were on the scene throughout the night. Three of the van’s tires were deflated so it couldn’t be moved.

“Her moods would shift. At times she would be easygoing and then she appeared agitated,” Petrak said. “She was afraid that we were going to break into her van.”

At one point, Gunther asked to see news coverage of her protest. Police showed her footage from a television monitor placed in the U.N. driveway.

Her brother, Darol Chamberlain of Ithaca, N.Y., spoke with her by telephone shortly before she gave up.

“She had been cramped and cold all night. She was happy to be out of there,” said Petrak, who talked to Gunther through the van’s closed window off and on all night.

Police said Chamberlain’s 71-year-old father also had been contacted. The elder Chamberlain, who won the Nobel Prize in 1959 for discovering the anti-proton, is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career doing atomic research during World War II and worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.