6 Children, Teacher Held in French Hostage Drama : Ordeal: The hooded captor, claiming to have explosives, demands a huge ransom. He frees 15 pupils.

A hooded man claiming to be armed with explosives and demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom held a class of 3- and 4-year-old children hostage into the night in this wealthy Paris suburb Thursday as officials tried to negotiate a peaceful conclusion.

The man, wearing gloves and a black hood that revealed only his eyes, was described by witnesses as calm and well-spoken when he entered the preschool classroom of the Commandant Charcot school shortly before 10 a.m. He threatened to blow up the school if his demand for 100 million francs, about $18.5 million, in gold and small bills was not met.

After negotiating with parents and Neuilly Mayor Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also budget minister and chief spokesman for the French government, the man released 15 of the 21 children held in the classroom with their teacher, Laurence Dreyfus.

According to Agence France-Presse, the man early today handed authorities a message stating that he would “rather die than be captured alive” and threatening to use the children as a human shield to aid in his escape. At 4 a.m., the man asked to left alone with the remaining children.

During the night, he provided authorities details of his demands for money and possible escape routes.

One report said the demands were signed with the same initials used by the writer of a message left after another attack the night of May 8-9 that damaged property in Neuilly. Authorities speculated that the man may have planned the first attack to demonstrate his seriousness during the hostage negotiations.

The six children remaining in the school were reported to be sleeping peacefully early today after their teacher gave each a mild sedative. Their anxious parents, some of whom brought sleeping bags for the vigil, waited through the night in an adjacent classroom building.

The hostage drama, the first of its type in modern France, unfolded in an unlikely setting. Neuilly has the highest per-capita income in the Paris region, and its residents, including many Americans and other foreign nationals, take special pride in its low crime rate and safe streets.

As darkness approached, the hostage-taker demanded to see a reporter from the French TF1 television network to “correct” what he said were false radio reports, which he monitored in the classroom during the day.

TF1 reporter Jean-Pierre About said the man told him that he had no intention of harming the children. About said that when he arrived in the classroom, the children were playing happily with their teacher, “unaware of the drama taking place around them.”

According to About, the man repeatedly stated that his only motive in taking the preschoolers hostage was the ransom money.

“He was calm and spoke French well,” About said, “I couldn’t detect any special accent.”

The reporter said he was accompanied into the classroom by a special agent used by the police in hostage and kidnaping cases.

As he calmly repeated his demands, About said the man held what looked like a small wooden spool wrapped with wire that he said--”or at least pretended”--was a detonator.

“The police seem to believe that he has real dynamite,” About said.

As hungry toddlers started crying four hours after the start of the siege, the father of one of them, Pierre Narboni, persuaded the man to release his son and seven other children in exchange for milk and sandwiches.

The man later released another child and let a doctor into the room. In the evening and early morning he released six more children.

Police evacuated the rest of the school’s 230 children from classrooms, handing some of them over the school fence to their parents.

“We were very scared. We nearly all cried,” said a little girl who was taken to a lunchroom to wait for her parents.