South African police spent hours looking for a 43-year-old man reported kidnapped this week, but at the end of a costly seven-hour search across the Johannesburg region, it turned out that the kidnapper and the victim were the same person. Andre Lottering, an unemployed cabinet maker called his wife on Tuesday, saying he had been hijacked on a freeway outside the city.
One of Mark Thatcher’s key business partners has turned ‘state witness’ and is alleged to have given dramatic new evidence to South African police investigating Thatcher’s role in the alleged coup to overthrow the President of Equatorial Guinea.
The revelation comes as speculation mounts over what British and United States officials knew about the alleged plot and when.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=121268">Zim 70: Two released</a>
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=121194">Mark Thatcher: The money trail </a>
In an alleyway next to Najaf’s Imam Ali shrine, Commander Sayed Haider rested on Friday. For more than three weeks he and his fellow fighters from the Mahdi army had battled against the vast firepower of the United States military. Now was a time to reflect. ”We believe that we are right. This is our country. This is our city. We will not accept that people come and occupy our land,” he said.
Six Cubans trying to reach Mexico spent two months at sea, mostly on a nine-metre boat, before landing on Mustang Island on the Texas coast, United States Customs and Border Protection officials said on Thursday. Five men were treated and released from hospital early on Thursday, a day after they were found on the beach. The sixth person, a woman, remained in hospital in a stable condition.
Nearly 300 people living in remote mountain villages in Taiwan were airlifted to safety on Saturday morning as continued bad weather threatened a fresh wave of mudslides in the district most affected by Typhoon Aere. Hundreds of rescuers continued to search for survivors and evacuate residents from Wufeng Township in the northern Hsinchu county.
An -million joint Japanese-United States project to research cosmic rays was slated for groundbreaking on Saturday in the desert state of Utah. The Japanese government is contributing -million to the project, which involves building three hilltop ”fluorescence” detectors and another 576 smaller detectors scattered over a 1 000 square kilometre area.
The leader of the United States Episcopal Church told Ugandan Anglican bishops on Friday to keep out of its affairs after three Los Angeles parishes decided to ally themselves with an African diocese in the row over homosexual clergy. The parishes, in Newport Beach, Long Beach and North Hollywood, are the first to seek oversight from a bishop overseas.
Fingerprint evidence links the killing of the Zambian president’s brother with the attempted murder of a Hong Kong tour guide, the Pretoria Regional Court heard on Friday. Claurina Chaka’s fingerprints were found in Chung Man Hei Ward’s hotel room, police fingerprint expert Donnie Mokeri testified.
Henry Kissinger gave Argentina’s military junta the green light to suppress political opposition at the start of the ”dirty war” in 1976, telling the country’s foreign minister: ”If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” according to newly-declassified documents published on Friday.
Two of the 70 suspected mercenaries arrested in Zimbabwe on suspicion of plotting a coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea were released on Friday after they were acquitted of all charges. Prosecutors claimed Harry Carlse and Lourens Horn, both South Africans, were hired to inspect a consignment of weapons intended to be used in the alleged plot. But Magistrate Mishrod Guvamombe said the state failed to prove its case against the men.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=121194">Mark Thatcher: The money trail</a>