At 3am, the police swoop - and end America's living nightmare

It started, literally, with a bang and ended with the two most wanted men in America being arrested without incident as they slept in their car in a wooded rest area on a Maryland highway.

Police swooped shortly after 3am yesterday, seizing the men as they slept in a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice in Myers-ville, 50 miles north-west of the nation's anxious capital, apparently bringing to an end the three-week killing spree that has terrorised the Washington area. A .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle was found tucked behind the front seats.

The arrest of John Allen Muhammad, 41, who was taken into custody with 17-year-old Jon Lee Malvo, came just hours after police had announced they were looking for him and describing him as "armed and dangerous".

Ironically enough, given the endless police requests over the past three weeks for information about anyone driving a white van, the tip to officers came from a man driving such a vehicle.

"I'm confident that these are indeed the people," said one law enforcement source involved in the investigation. "The evidence is all there. It fits together with evidence collected in the last couple of days."

The arrest of the two men came amid a flurry of intense activity. This reached as far as 3,000 miles away from the scene of the 13 shootings around the nation's capital to Washington state, where police spent much of the day retrieving spent ammunition from the backyard of a home in Tacoma where Mr Muhammad and Mr Malvo had recently been living.

But it emerged that the end of the serial sniper killings – if indeed this does mark the conclusion – came about as the result of a tip regarding a murder in Montgomery, Alabama, even though no one had realised the crimes were linked. Sources said that this vital breakthrough came when someone phoned the sniper hotline, urging the police to investigate an incident in "Montgomery".

Some reports yesterday said that the call was made by the man who detectives had previously spoken to and who identified himself as the gunman. The mayor of Montgomery, Bobby Bright, said the caller claimed responsibility for both the sniper shootings and the robbery of a liquor store.

Investigators following up the call linked the call to a murder and robbery committed on 21 September at the Alabama Beverage Control (ABC) store. Two female shop assistants on duty that day were shot and wounded – one fatally.

Police sources said a fingerprint found on a piece of paper at the scene of the robbery matched that of Mr Malvo.

Other unconfirmed reports said the $10m ransom demand from the gunman, made public earlier this week, had requested the money be electronically transferred to an account linked to a credit card stolen from one of the assistants.

At a press conference in Montgomery yesterday morning, the Police Chief John Wilson, said a composite sketch of a suspect in the robbery bore "some very good similarities" to one of the men arrested in Maryland. But he said the gun used in the ABC incident was a handgun and not the same weapon used in the sniper shootings.

Quite what Mr Malvo may have been doing in Alabama is unclear, as is why the authorities had his fingerprints on record. There was a brief flurry of reports suggesting the men had attended a shooting range outside Montgomery. The owner of the Camp Ground Zero range Mark Yates, who is British, said suggestions that either Mr Malvo or Mr Muhammad had spent time there were "absolute nonsense" and the FBI later confirmed it was not investigating the range.

But the fingerprint led investigators to a house in Tacoma, Washington state, which Mr Malvo and Mr Muhammad had visited as recently as January. Records show that Mr Muhammad lived in the house from 1994 until 2000 and had since returned. The army veteran had previously been stationed at nearby Fort Lewis.

As officers spent much of Wednesday digging up the back yard of the house and searching for spent ammunition using metal detectors and chain-saws, which they used to cut down a tree stump that had apparently been used as a target, police also took Mr Malvo's student records from the town's Bellingham High School, which he attended until last year.

Meanwhile, as news of the search was breaking, the police chief in Montgomery County, Maryland, was preparing for what would be his strangest press conference yet.

In previous days Charles Moose had delivered a series of bizarre and cryptic messages to the gunman, asking the media to broadcast them to help him continue his dialogue with the killer. But despite this pattern no one was quite expecting the words that em-erged from the police chief's mouth as he approached the microphones close to midnight.

"You have indicated that you want us to do and say certain things," said Chief Moose. "You've asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose'.

"We understand that hearing us say this is important to you." He appealed for the sniper to make contact again.

That call was not forthcoming but within an hour police had received one that would prove to be even more important. It came from a man who was at a rest area close to Interstate 70 in Frederick County, Maryland.

Calling police on his mobile phone, he said that he had spotted a vehicle that match-ed the description provided by Police Chief Moose an hour or so earlier – a blue or burgundy 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with a New Jersey licence plate NDA 21Z.

It seems that police SWAT teams took some time to surround the vehicle. An attendant at the rest stop, Larry Blank, told CNN that he had arrived for work at midnight and, as was his habit, had listened to a police scanner.

"[Just before 1am I noticed] a lot of noise on my scanner," he said. "Then I noticed that the exit ramp was blocked."

Mr Blank went to investigate and joined a man in a van who was on the phone to police. Together they watched the car.

For what seemed like a considerable time there was no activity. Then, at 3.19am, there was a rush towards the car.

"We didn't actually see any police officers for a while, until they actually stormed the parking lot where the vehicle was," Mr Blank said. "There were helicopters, police cars everywhere."

At a press conference after the arrests were made, Major Greg Shipley, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police, was asked what had been the reaction of the two men as they were arrested.

"I don't know what their reaction was," he said. "It wasn't an aggressive one."