Today's other stories in brief
Court drops Pinochet family charges
SANTIAGO - A court has dropped charges against Augusto Pinochet's widow and two of his children, who had been indicted as accomplices of Chile's late dictator over alleged tax evasion and the use of false passports.
Lucia Hiriart and two of Pinochet's daughters, Lucia and Veronica, together with his long-time secretary, Monica Ananias, were cleared by the Santiago court of appeals. - (Guardian service)
Explosives find in Basque village
MADRID - Spanish police said they found 100kg of explosives in a Basque village yesterday and said they appeared to have been stored there by Eta guerrillas.
The explosives were stored in a container in the village of Atxondo, the Basque country police force said in a news release, adding they were ready for immediate use. - ( Reuters)
Seven dead as train hits truck in Turkey
ANKARA - Seven people were killed and 19 injured yesterday when a freight train ploughed into a truck in southeast Turkey, the state Anatolian news agency reported.
The accident occurred at a level crossing in the province of Hatay near the Syrian border. The truck had been carrying farm workers from a nearby province. - (Reuters)
Human trafficking ring dismantled
BUCHAREST - Romanian authorities have broken up a cross-border human trafficking ring based in southwestern Romania that forced children to steal from cars and shops in Italy, border police said yesterday. They said the 15-strong gang, controlled by Romanians, was the largest trafficking network dismantled so far in the Black Sea state, which joined the EU on January 1st. - (Reuters)
Madrid train bombs arrest
MADRID - Spanish police have arrested a man on suspicion that he supplied money to a suspect in the Madrid train bombings, the interior ministry said yesterday, a day after police arrested five people for links to the 2004 attack.
Police arrested Taha Seghrouchni in a town in Catalonia on suspicion of transferring significant amounts of money into the account of Daoud Ouhnane, one of the suspects believed to have fled Spain after the bombs, which killed 191 people. - (Reuters)
Boy's death linked to Saddam hanging
HOUSTON - A 10-year-old American boy who hanged himself may have been spurred to do it by television coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution, police said yesterday.
Relatives told police in Webster, Texas that Sergio Pelico had seen the video of the former Iraqi leader's hanging and asked about it before the incident on Sunday. - (Reuters)
Moroccan Islamist cell broken up
RABAT - Moroccan security forces have dismantled an Islamist cell recruiting volunteers to fight in Iraq and arrested 62 people, the government said. "The first elements of the inquiry reveal the existence of ideological links with and financial and logistical support for international terrorist groups," it said. - (Reuters)