NightBlogger

Russian investigators have launched a criminal case on charges of genocide in connection with the events in South Ossetia. Russia’s Interfax news agency reports that the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office has said Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may also be put on trial. More

Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus. The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.

Authorities claim that the alleged victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but, according to investigators, was actually an anti bird-flu drug. The director of a Grudziadz homeless centre, Mieczyslaw Waclawski, told a Polish newspaper that last year, 21 people from his centre died, a figure well above the average of about eight. More

An engineer is on trial in Germany for allegedly attempting to help Libya develop a nuclear bomb. But the network the man was allegedly part of was under surveillance by intelligence agencies, with the CIA getting involved early on. The Swiss government has even gone so far as to eliminate evidence by secretly shredding thousands of documents.

The story should really begin in Stuttgart, the southern Germany city where the case has now been on trial for the past two weeks, where defendant Gotthard Lerch, 65, can be seen on Thursdays and Fridays in Courtroom 18, and where an international smuggling ring, which sought to sell the makings of a nuclear bomb to Libya between 1997 and 2003, is acquiring a face. It’s the wrong face if you go by Lerch’s defense lawyers, but the right one, according to the federal prosecutors. The face of the defendant, at any rate, is that of an elegant older man with grey hair and an occasional smirk. He stands accused of having been part of a ring of which US President George W. Bush once said he would capture and eliminate, “each and every one.” More

Bloomberg
Italian police used mobile phone records and hotel information to identify two dozen alleged U.S. intelligence agents accused of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan, the city’s top anti-terrorism investigator said.

Calls made from those numbers to local hotels were linked to U.S. citizens who were guests there, he said. “We determined that the U.S. citizens had several mobile phone numbers and some were used during the kidnapping,” Megale said. “The phones were used to contact various U.S. numbers in Virginia and the CIA station chief in Milan.” The CIA’s headquarters is in Langley, Virginia.

Megale said police recognized the CIA station chief’s cell phone number from call lists because he was their main contact for terrorism issues. More

rinf.com
A Milan judge ruled Wednesday that Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi, can be called as witnesses in a trial on the alleged abduction of a terrorism suspect by agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Berlusconi who returned to office as premier last week was in power in 2003 when an Egyptian imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr - better known in Italy as Abu Omar - was allegedly snatched from a Milan street.

A total of 33 defendants - including 26 CIA agents as well as several top Italian intelligence officials - are accused of Omar’s kidnapping, with the complicity of Italy’s military intelligence agency SISMI. Read more