Los Angeles  - A woman who tried to assassinate police officers thirty years ago and hid for 24 years mostly as a suburban housewife was released from jail Tuesday after serving almost eight years of a 14-year sentence.

Sara Jane Olson, 62, was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, an urban guerrilla group in the US which is most notorious for the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

She will serve her parole in Minnesota where she lived as a doctor's wife until she was arrested in 1999 following a tip-off - a move that brought condemnation from California police unions.

Formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, she pled guilty in 2001 to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder.

According to prosecutors, she had taken part in a bank robbery in April 1975 in which a woman was shot and killed, and she also was involved in planting a bomb under two police cars in August the same year.

Soliah went underground after being indicted in 1976, assuming the name Sarah Jane Olson, marrying a doctor in St Paul Minnesota and becoming a mother to three daughters. She was arrested in 1999 following a tip-off that police received after she was profiled on the television show America's Most Wanted.

She was mistakenly released from prison last year due to a clerical error and re-arrested five days later.

Soliah's release Tuesday was condemned by police unions.

"It is not enough to simply send her off to another state and hope for the best," Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul Weber said in a statement issued Tuesday. "It was a California mother of four she was convicted of murdering. It was Los Angeles police officers she attempted to blow up. We continue to believe that the community she targeted with her crimes retains the right to ensure she complies with the terms of her parole." (dpa)