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[OMEN]

THE parents of Madeleine McCann won £550,000 ($1.2 million) in libel damages today from newspapers that repeatedly alleged they killed their missing daughter and covered up her death.

Kate and Gerry McCann received an apology at the High Court in London from the publishers of the Daily Express and the Daily Star over more than 100 defamatory stories.
"It is difficult to conceive a more serious allegation than to be falsely accused of being responsible for the death of one's daughter," their lawyer Adam Tudor told the court.

The McCanns said the money would be donated to the fund set up to find their daughter. The family has not yet decided whether to take action against other newspapers.

Tudor told the court that the articles included a variety of false claims, including that the McCanns killed their daughter, sold her to pay off debts or were involved in "wife-swapping".

"The general theme of the articles was to suggest that Mr and Mrs McCann were responsible for the death of Madeleine," he said.

The Daily Express and Daily Star published rare front-page apologies and said there was no evidence to support the claims.

The papers' lawyer Stephen Bacon told the court: "Express Newspapers regrets publishing these extremely serious, yet baseless, allegations."

In a statement read by their spokesman outside court, the McCanns said: "We are pleased that Express Newspapers have admitted the utter falsity of the numerous grotesque and grossly defamatory allegations that their titles published about us on a sustained basis."

Madeleine McCann disappeared shortly before her fourth birthday while on holiday in Praia da Luz, prompting a huge police investigation and blanket media coverage.

Media commentator and former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade said "wild claims" about the McCanns had undermined British journalism.

"This was no journalistic accident, but a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family," he wrote in his blog.

"The stories were not merely speculative, but laced with innuendo."

The McCanns believe their daughter was abducted from their flat while they had dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant.

They hired private investigators to help find their daughter after police named them as suspects in September.

The investigation dominated newspaper front pages and TV bulletins for months, with many stories questioning the role of the girl's parents in her disappearance.

Despite a string of possible sightings, her whereabouts remains a mystery.

Reuters

[OMEN]

TWO men were jailed for life today for the murder of South African historian David Rattray, a friend of Britain's Prince Charles.

Simphiwe Ndlovu, 25, and Sibonela Mponza, 28, were sentenced in the Pietermaritzburg High Court in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province more than a year after they shot and killed Rattray in a botched robbery at his home, the SAPA news agency reported.

Three other members of their gang were earlier jailed for 25 years each.

The murder of 48-year-old Rattray, an expert on the Anglo-Zulu war, had caused international shockwaves.

South Africa has one of highest crime rates in the world, with nearly 20,000 murders reported in the country of 48 million every hear.

Agence France-Presse

[OMEN]

MEXICO captured a high-ranking Tijuana drug cartel hitman yesterday, the public security ministry said, the second big arrest to hit the organisation in five days.

Saul Montes de Oca, known as "El Ciego" (the blind guy) and close to cartel bosses, was arrested as he was about to take part in a car race in the tourist resort of San Felipe, the Baja California state attorney general's office said.

Mr Montes de Oca is suspected of being a top killer at the powerful cartel, also called as the Arellano Felix Organisation and known for its gruesome torture and execution methods.

He also faces extradition to the US where he is wanted on organized crime charges, the ministry said.

Police had been tracking him for five months and got a breakthrough this week when they dismantled a kidnapping ring whose leaders said they reported to him.

The capture was also helped by the arrest on Tuesday of another senior Tijuana operative, Gustavo Rivera Martinez, who is being extradited to the US to face drug charges.

Mr Montes de Oca worked for Rivera Martinez, handling drug cargo movements and abductions, the security ministry said.

The arrests were the latest in a series of victories for President Felipe Calderon's 15-month-old army crackdown on drug traffickers and the latest blow to the Tijuana gang, which has seen a string of its leaders jailed or killed in recent years.

The feared Arellano Felix family controls drug routes in the northwestern state of Baja California, including around the busy border crossing of Tijuana, where it fights for turf with the Sinaloa alliance that controls most of western Mexico.

Montes de Oca was involved in a 1997 assassination attempt on a renowned Tijuana journalist who exposed drug gang crimes.

Half a dozen raids on the Tijuana cartel this year have put around 30 mid-level operatives behind bars. A bust this month of one of its safe houses turned up a huge arsenal of weapons, including guns decorated with gold skulls.

One former Tijuana cartel boss was released from a US jail this month and returned home, but with many of the rest of the clan of sibling leaders still in prison, analysts believe a sister is now in charge.

Mr Calderon sent some 25,000 soldiers and federal police to drug hotspots on taking office in December 2006,

reuters

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy has abandoned a lawsuit against a magazine which alleged that he offered to take back his former wife.

The Nouvel Observateur said Mr Sarkozy had made the offer in a text message to Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz - a week before marrying his current wife, Carla Bruni.

Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy now says Mr Sarkozy has withdrawn the complaint after she received an apology.

But despite apologising, the reporter refuses to retract the story entirely.

In the article, Airy Routier alleged that eight days before Mr Sarkozy's marriage to Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy on 2 February, he sent a text message to his former wife, saying: "If you come back, I'll call it all off."

On Wednesday, Mr Routier's letter of apology to Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy was reprinted on the website of Le Nouvel Observateur.

Message claim

Mr Sarkozy remarried on 2 February - less than four months after the end of his volatile marriage to Ms Ciganer-Albeniz.

The allegation that just days before the wedding, he offered to call it off in a text message to his former wife, prompted Mr Sarkozy to file a suit against the weekly Nouvel Observateur.

However, in Wednesday's Le Monde newspaper, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy says her husband decided to withdraw the complaint after they received a letter of apology from Mr Routier.

In an opinion article entitled "Stop the slander", she accuses Le Nouvel Observateur of failing to check the allegation.

Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy goes on to berate the media for falling standards of accuracy, asking: "If, from now on, rumour is used as the basis for news, if fantasies become scoops, where are we headed?

"If major newspapers fail to sift out rumour from facts, who will do it?

"If, like the trashiest of magazines, Le Nouvel Observateur, betraying its charter, its calling and even its name, ceases to observe but makes up the stories it tells, what defence is left to us against the hysteria of the age?"

'Indelicacy'

But in a statement written in response to Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy's, Mr Routier insists the story was not wrong.

"I have absolutely not modified my position on the authenticity of the contested SMS," he says.

He said that - of his own initiative - he did indeed write a "private letter" to Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy apologising for having hurt her feelings by publishing the allegation.

"This letter should, in my view, have remained private. [But] Carla Bruni has had the indelicacy of referring to it publicly while distorting the meaning. Therefore, with regret, I have decided to publish the entire contents of the letter," Mr Routier writes.

Reports say Ms Ciganer-Albeniz denies ever having received the text message in question - and according to Reuters news agency, Mr Routier acknowledges not having seen the message himself.

But, the agency says, Mr Routier insists he received the information from a strong source.

BBC News