Jakarta – Mobil Oil Indonesia has temporarily suspended production from a satellite of its eastern Aceh gas field in the wake of last week's hostage taking incident, the company's spokesman said Wednesday.

"We are temporarily suspending our satellite operation in Pase field pending further review," Mobil's communications advisor in Jakarta, Julia Tumengkol, told AFP.

The temporary halt came two days after armed men had ended their three-day occupation of an operations control room, when they took two men hostage at Mobil's A-1 natural gas well cluster in the Pase gas field, East Aceh.

The rebels, who had threatened to blow up the facility unless their demands were fulfilled, released the hostages after several hours. They left the area on Monday without claiming the four billion rupiah (476,190 dollars) they had demanded from Mobil to save the field, Tumengkol said.

Tumengkol said the suspension of production at the field at Pase – which supplements production from Mobil's giant Arun field in North Aceh – would not affect scheduled gas deliveries from the Arun field. Production from other fields would be temporarily used to offset the production from Pase field, Tumengkol said.

Meanwhile a spokesman for the Free Aceh (GAM) movement, Ismail Syahputra, in a statement received by AFP, repeated his insistence that GAM was not involved in the occupation of the gas field.