The Dubai chief of police called yesterday for the arrest of Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, if it is proved that the Israeli spy agency was behind the assassination of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Lieutenant-General Dahi Khalfan Tamim called on Interpol, in a statement last night, to issue a red arrest notice seeking Mr Dagan’s extradition “as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is most likely now”.

An insider close to the case confirmed that Mr Dagan and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, are top of the Gulf state’s wanted list.

“Our investigations reveal that Mossad is involved in the murder of al-Mabhouh,” General Tamim said. “It is 99 per cent, if not 100 per cent, that Mossad is standing behind the murder.”

Police in Dubai said that they would release new evidence in the coming days that proves that the assassination can be traced to the Mossad headquarters in Herzliya, a suburb north of Tel Aviv. Officials have never ruled Mossad out of their investigation but have stopped short of accusing the Israeli spy agency directly until now.

Some Israeli commentators are openly calling for Mr Dagan to resign, arguing that the diplomatic row and negative publicity generated by the assassination are unacceptable.

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It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

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The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews.

The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit.

A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

The bones are thought to be from up to 100 people and were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work.

They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that they have since been stored in a repository.

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DUBAI – A heavily armed gang of illegal alcohol “bootleggers” kidnapped two members of a rival gang, tortured them, homosexually assaulted them and buried them alive, a court heard today.

The 13 gang members appeared at Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance this morning charged with two counts of kidnap, murder and hiding bodies. Five of the men are also charged with sexual assault, and 10 with consumption of alcohol.

All 13 denied the charges, but could face the death penalty if convicted.

The court heard how the gang of 12 Indians and one Pakistani allegedly kidnapped Abu Baker Nujila and another man who has not been identified on January 1 last year and assaulted them with metal bars, pipes, sticks, swords, machetes and knives. Five of the men are then alleged to have raped the victims before the whole gang buried them in makeshift, sand covered graves.

The defendants were arrested, according to prosecution records, on January 25 after information came to light that the men’s bodies had been found buried in Jebel Ali.

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Four Egyptian nationals were in custody in Milan on Sunday and tension in a heavily immigrant quarter was high after the death of an Egyptian man at the weekend sparked some of the most serious racially motivated violence in the city for years.

Windows were broken and cars overturned in the violence as young, mainly north-African immigrants clashed with police for much of Saturday night following a stabbing incident. Police named the 19-year-old victim as Hamed Mamoud El Fayed Adou and indicated his attackers were South American.

The incident came a month after Italy’s worst ever outbreak of racially motivated rioting, in the southern town of Rosarno. That involved clashes between local people and migrant workers. Although nobody was killed, it added to a swelling and increasingly heated debate in Italy about immigration and racism.

The incident in Milan comes ahead of local elections across Italy next month where immigration is already becoming a hot campaigning issue. Political reaction yesterday suggested a sharp divide between right and left on immigration, the appropriate response to soaring numbers of illegal migrants, and how to respond to the increasing incidents of violence.

The rioting occurred in Via Padova, a boulevard near the central railway station that Riccardo de Corato, Milan’s deputy mayor and a member of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right governing party, described as one of the city’s most multi-ethnic quarters.

He described the area as “like the wild west, divided among gangs of north Africans and South Americans”.

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The Arizona Department of Corrections said Viva Leroy Nash died late on Friday at the state prison in Florence.

Nash had a criminal record dating back to the 1930s, and was deaf, mostly blind, mentally ill and had dementia, his lawyer said.

He was sentenced to death in 1983, for shooting a salesman after escaping from jail. But he managed to stave off his execution with a series of appeals.

At the time of his death, state prosecutors were appealing to the Supreme Court against a federal appeals court ruling that Nash might not be mentally competent to assist in his defence.

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Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (CNN) — A Dominican man who is acting as a legal adviser to 10 Americans arrested on child kidnapping charges in Haiti is himself facing allegations of human trafficking in El Salvador and human smuggling charges in the United States.

An international arrest warrant was issued Saturday for the legal adviser on sex-trafficking charges.

Salvadoran police raided a home in May that turned up passports and an ID card in the names of both Jorge Torres Puello and his alias, Jorge Torres Orellana. Each of the documents bore photos of the same man. His wife was arrested in that raid and charged with sex trafficking, and her trial is pending.

In a phone interview with CNN on Sunday, Jorge Torres Puello acknowledged he is the same man wanted by Salvadoran authorities. He denied the charges against him.

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A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign just hours after the inquiry’s launch.

Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting they had done nothing wrong.

In a statement, he said he was stepping down in order to ensure that the ability of the review team to carry out its investigation would not be called into question.

The inquiry, led by the distinguished civil servant Sir Muir Russell, was set up after hacked emails from the CRU scientists prompted accusations that they had been manipulating the data.

However Channel 4 News reported last night that Dr Campbell, the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, told Chinese State Radio last year that he did not believe the emails showed any evidence of improper conduct.

‘The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong,’ he told the station.

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A plot to smuggle more than £200m of cocaine was foiled when a boat carrying the drugs was shipwrecked off the Irish coast, a court has heard.

John Edney, 57, of Main Road, Sutton-at-Hone, Kent, is accused of providing three 4×4 vehicles used by the drugs gang.

Blackfriars Crown Court heard Mr Edney denied conspiracy to supply a class A drug, namely cocaine.

The court heard a total of 1,554kg (3,425lb) of the drug was discovered.

The court heard that on or before 9 July 2007, he conspired together with Michael Daly, Alan Wells and others to supply the drug.

According to prosecuting counsel Mark Gadsden, Daly, 49, a retired Metropolitan Police detective sergeant who organised the logistics, and Wells, 56, previously pleaded guilty to their part in the conspiracy.

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It’s every technophobe’s nightmare, but this time its true. Some $50,000 was stolen from Fan Bao’s online bank account by Croatian computer hackers and the bank told him that the loss is not their problem.

Could it happen to you? Here’s the back story to help fill in who is at risk.

Seven years ago, Fan Bao opened a checking account at Bank of America to facilitate his small import-export business called ZICO USA. When he needed to wire money, he or his wife, Cathy Huang, would walk a few blocks to Bank of America’s Highland Park, Calif., branch and execute the transfer in person.

But two summers ago, a BofA branch official urged Bao to do his banking online, assuring him that it was every bit as safe as banking in person. Only wires sent from Zico’s computer, accompanied by a downloaded security certificate, would be honored, he was told. Bao followed the bank’s security instructions to the letter, and accepted the bank’s assurances that his money was safe.

But last summer, two fraudulent drafts were sent through Bao’s account–one for $50,000 and another for $99,100. Both drafts were going to a bank in Croatia that Bao had never done business with. In fact, Bao had never before sent a wire transfer to anyone outside of Hong Kong or China.

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