By ALAN CLENDENNING
The Associated Press
Monday, August 14, 2006; 8:37 AM

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- A kidnapped television reporter from Brazil's dominant television network was released Monday morning by a gang that has spread urban terror throughout South America's largest city.

After being held for about 40 hours by the First Capital Command gang, Guilherme Portanova was driven in the trunk of a car and set free in a neighborhood several miles from the offices of Globo TV, Brazil's most watched television channel.

Globo showed footage of Portanova, 30, arriving shirtless at the network's offices before being reunited with his parents. He said he was kept masked during the entire abduction but was fed and not beaten.

The reporter was freed after Globo met the gang's demand to broadcast a video calling for improvements in Brazil's troubled prison system.

Portanova and a technician were kidnapped near Globo's Sao Paulo offices Saturday morning by armed men. The technician, Alexandre Coelho Calado, 27, was released that night along with the video, which was recorded on a DVD.

Globo interrupted its programming early Sunday to show the video of an armed and hooded man reading a statement criticizing prisons and demanding reviews of sentences. He said this was "the only way we found to transmit an announcement to society and the governing officials."

He complained about a law that keeps some inmates from having contact with other prisoners and from having access to radio, television and people on the outside, calling it "cruel punishment."

The gang is influential throughout Sao Paulo and is run by its imprisoned leaders. It is blamed for three waves of attacks on police, government buildings, banks and public buses over the last four months.

Globo said in a statement Sunday that it broadcast the video after consulting with the Belgium-based International News Safety Institute and the risk-assessment company AKE Group.