Seven people held hostage for nearly ten hours by a gunman who raided a US-owned consumer goods factory in western Turkey on Thursday had been released, local media reported. The armed man had surrendered and the seven people taken hostage in the factory in western Kocaeli province had been freed after a nine-and-a-half-hour-long ordeal, the newspaper Cumhuriyet and other Turkish media reported on Thursday evening. Authorities did not initially comment on the incident. The background to the attack was initially unclear. Demirören news agency reported that the gunman was protesting the ongoing …