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/ 13 February 2008
Negotiators have struck a deal to release two CBS News journalists missing, believed kidnapped, in Iraq and they could be free in hours, a leading Shi’ite militia group and the United States military said on Wednesday. Police in Basra said the men, a British journalist and an interpreter, were seized from a city centre hotel.
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/ 5 December 2007
British detectives said on Wednesday they had arrested a man who reappeared more than five years after he was presumed drowned in a canoeing accident. John Darwin was held on suspicion of fraud four days after he walked into a London police station and told officers he believed they might be looking for him.
An inquest into the death of Princess Diana finally opened on Tuesday, 10 years after she and Dodi al-Fayed were killed in a Paris car crash, with her lover’s father still convinced the two were victims of an establishment plot. Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of London’s luxury Harrods store, fought a long legal battle to have the inquest heard by a judge and jury.
Two major investigations by French and British police concluded that Princess Diana’s death in a Paris car crash was a tragic accident, but 10 years on many remain convinced she was murdered in a sinister plot. The usual suspects cited by conspiracy theorists include Britain’s royal family — because they were unhappy Diana was to marry her lover, Muslim Dodi al-Fayed.
The son of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was one of a gang of men jailed for stabbing a teenager to death near a London underground station, a British judge revealed on Friday. Faisal Wangita (25) was one of 13 men convicted over the killing of Mahir Osman in January 2006. Osman was stabbed more than 20 times in a feud between rival gangs.
Four men were convicted on Monday of plotting to bomb London’s transport system on July 21 2005 in a botched attempt to replicate Islamist suicide bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier. Police said the men, Muslims of African origin, would have caused carnage on a similar scale to the attacks a fortnight before.
British police believe they have arrested the main suspects in an al-Qaeda-style bomb plot, some of whom appeared in intelligence databases on radical Islamists, sources close to the investigation said on Wednesday. Security experts were considering reducing Britain’s terrorist threat level, four days after it was raised to ”critical”.
Police defused a car bomb packed with petrol, gas and nails outside a busy nightclub in the heart of London on Friday, foiling an attack that echoed an earlier al-Qaeda plot and could have killed or wounded scores of people. Possible bomb components were found in a second car hours later, police said on Friday evening.
British police defused a car bomb in central London on Friday and said the device, made up of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, could have caused significant loss of life. The bomb was left in a car parked outside a nightclub in the busy heart of London shortly after 1am local time, when ”hundreds” of people were in the vicinity.
Five Britons were found guilty on Monday of plotting to carry out al-Qaeda-inspired bomb attacks across Britain, potentially killing hundreds at targets ranging from nightclubs to trains and a shopping centre. The gang planned to use 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser to make explosives to be used in the bombings.