Today's other stories in brief
'Chessboard killer' guilty of 48 murders
MOSCOW - A Russian supermarket worker, dubbed "the chessboard murderer", was convicted yesterday of killing 48 people after he confessed in court that the first time he took a life was like falling in love.
Given his nickname by Russian media because he had hoped to put a coin on every square of a 64-square chessboard for each of his victims, Alexander Pichushkin also admitted to killing 11 more people not included in the court case.
The verdict makes 33-year-old Pichushkin Russia's deadliest serial killer since Andrei Chikatilo, known as the "Rostov Ripper". He was convicted in 1992 of killing more than 50 people.
- (Reuters)
Seven oil workers die fleeing storm
CAMPECHE - A storm killed as many as seven Mexican oil workers fleeing a battered offshore rig, while Navy rescue teams battled yesterday to reach others in two life rafts being tossed in rolling seas.
State-oil monopoly Pemex said it could not confirm the death toll as the figure kept changing, but Jorge Carlos Hurtado, governor for the Gulf of Mexico state of Campeche, said seven people had died.
- (Reuters)
US admits fault over torture case
WASHINGTON - Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice admitted yesterday the US had mishandled the case of a Canadian who was deported to Syria and tortured, but she stopped short of an apology. In a rare public admission of US fault, Ms Rice sounded contrite when she responded to a lawyer's question about Maher Arar, who was arrested during a stopover in New York in 2002 and deported to Syria where he says he was tortured and imprisoned for a year. - (Reuters)
Body of missing mother found
CALAS DE MALLORCA - Spanish police searching for Sara Cooper, the mother of the British girl who fell from the fifth floor of a hotel in Mallorca on Monday morning, found the body of a woman in the sea yesterday afternoon.
The body was recovered from an underwater cave at Cala Domingos on the headland just behind the hotel. Alfonso Jimenez Perez, the detective leading the investigation, said: "All that we can suppose is that it is her. We had been looking for her since 10am . . . All we know at the moment is that she had fallen into the water . . . the sea carried her into [ the underwater cave]."
Mrs Cooper, Cambridgeshire, eastern England, had not been seen since her daughter (7), Gianna, fell from the balcony of their hotel in Calas de Mallorca. - (Reuters)