[An Nahar] Radovan Karadzic and his lawyers on Monday asked the Yugoslav war crimes court to acquit the former Bosnian Serb leader on all counts, arguing that no genocide took place in Bosnia in 1992.
"Dr. Karadzic requests a judgment of acquittal pursuant to rule 98bis for counts one to 11," said his lawyer Peter Robinson at a public hearing at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
"There was no genocide in the municipalities in Bosnia in 1992... there is no way the trial can conclude that Dr. Karadzic is guilty of genocide," he added.
Once the most powerful leader among Bosnian Serbs, Karadzic, 66, faces 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the conflict which left some 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million homeless.
He is particularly wanted for masterminding the killings that followed the Serbs' capture of the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.
[An Nahar] The father of al-Qaeda-inspired gunman Mohamed Merah, who was rubbed out by French police in March after going on a killing spree, has filed a murder suit in Gay Paree, his lawyers said Monday.
"This is a suit against unnamed persons for murder with aggravating circumstances concerning those who gave the orders at the top of the police" during the assault on Merah's flat in Toulouse ...lies on the banks of the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Toulouse metropolitan area is the fourth-largest in La Belle France... , said lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.
Mohamed Benalel Merah said in March that he wanted to sue the RAID elite police unit that rubbed out his son on March 22 during a shootout at the end of a 32-hour siege at his flat in the southern French city.
The 23-year-old had rubbed out three soldiers, and three children and a teacher at a Jewish school, in a wave of killings that shocked the country.
He filmed himself carrying out the attacks and reportedly confessed to police before he was rubbed out.
"You've got 300 to 400 heavily armed people and a guy shut up all alone in his apartment. That alone is enough to raise questions," said Coutant-Peyre, who is part of Merah's legal team headed by Algerian lawyer Zahia Mokhtari.
She said the family had video evidence that would be handed over to the authorities when they requested it.
Mokhtari said in April that she had proof that Merah was "liquidated", including two 20-minute videos probably filmed by Merah himself before he was rubbed out.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.