'No evidence' in Afghan massacre

20 March 2012 Last updated at 23:40 GMT  A photo showing Sgt Robert Bales (left) has been removed from a military website The lawyer representing a US soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in their homes has said there is little proof of his client's guilt.

John Henry Browne said there was "no forensic evidence" against Staff Sgt Robert Bales and "no confession".

He also dismissed reports suggesting Sgt Bales, 38, was having financial troubles as irrelevant to the case.

Sgt Bales is being held a military detention centre awaiting charges, which are expected this week.

The killings have undermined US relations with Kabul and led to calls for Nato to speed up their planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

After meeting with Sgt Bales at a US army base in Kansas, Mr Browne told reporters: "We've all heard the allegations. I don't know that the government has proved much."

Sgt Bales is the only known suspect in the killings - despite repeated Afghan assertions that more than one American was involved.

Mr Browne said he now plans to travel to Afghanistan to gather his own evidence.

Money troubles

The lawyer also responded to questions about Sgt Bales' financial history.

He and his wife had reportedly struggled to make the payments on two properties they had bought.

It has now also emerged that - along with another man and his company - Sgt Bales owed a reported $1.5m (£950,000) from an arbitration ruling nearly a decade ago which found him guilty of securities fraud while he was working as a stockbroker.

Mr Browne told Associated Press "that doesn't mean anything".

Sgt Bales and his wife were reportedly having trouble making their mortgage payments

"Sure, there are financial problems. I have financial problems. Ninety-nine percent of America has financial problems," he said.

"You don't go kill women and children because you have financial problems."

His wife, Karilyn, has issued a statement expressing her condolences to the victims and their families and saying what reportedly took place is "completely out of character of the man I know and admire".

Mr Browne first met his client at Fort Leavenworth on Monday to begin preparing his defence.

The Pentagon has previously said that Sgt Bales could face charges that carry a possible death penalty.

Such a trial could take years, contrasting with Afghan demands for swift and decisive justice.

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Dutch liable for massacre in Java

14 September 2011 Last updated at 22:06 GMT A court in the Netherlands has found the Dutch state responsible for a massacre by its colonial troops in Indonesia in 1947.

It said the government was liable to pay compensation to relatives of those killed in an operation against independence fighters.

Almost the entire male population of a village east of Jakarta was shot dead.

The Dutch authorities say 150 people were killed in Rawagedeh - the victims' group says it was more than 400.

"This court finds that the (Dutch) state acted wrongly through these executions and that the state is liable to pay damages in terms of the law," judge Daphne Schreuder said in The Hague on Wednesday.

The judge added that "the state's argument that the case has expired based on the statute of limitations and of reasonableness and fairness is unacceptable".

The BBC's Anna Holligan in The Hague says it was a notorious massacre that happened in western Java during Indonesia's bloody battle for independence from colonial rule.

None of the soldiers involved was ever prosecuted.

Over the last few years, the victims - including seven widows, one daughter and one of the few men who survived - have been fighting for compensation and recognition of the war crimes that were committed, our correspondent says.

The Dutch government had previously expressed its regret for the attack.

A separate hearing to determine the exact amount of compensation to be paid would be held later.

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German tourist rescued teens during island massacre

A German tourist is being hailed as a hero for rescuing at least 20 people from a gunman's rampage on Utoya island in Norway, according to media reports.

Marcel Gleffe, 32, was with his family Friday at a campground across the water from the island when he heard gunshots, Der Spiegel reported. He and his family looked out from the shore, thinking it might be fireworks, but instead they saw a plume of smoke and a girl swimming frantically in the water and screaming.

Story: Doubt cast on Norway gunman's claim of more cells

Gleffe got into the boat he had rented and set off, Der Spiegel said. He was the first person to reach the island where Anders Behring Breivik gunned down dozens of youngsters at a summer camp.

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"I just did it on instinct," Gleffe told The Telegraph newspaper.

"You don't get scared in a situation like that, you just do what it takes. I know the difference between fireworks and gunfire. I knew what it was about, and that it wasn't just nonsense."

He said many of the youths were suspicious and shouted, "Are you police, are you police?" Some of them reportedly shouted, "terrorist, terrorist, terrorist," as others tried to explain that the shooter was dressed in a police uniform.

Video: Girl pretended to be dead, survived Norway attack (on this page)

"They were happy to get help, but they were unsure whom they could trust," he told the local Dagbladet newspaper, according to The Telegraph.

"There were people swimming everywhere in the water. I threw them lifejackets and pulled those into the boat who were having the most trouble. Everyone was screaming, but they were also helping each other," he told Der Spiegel.

Slideshow: Norway in mourning after massacre (on this page)

Gleffe made several trips to the island to rescue around six people each time for about an hour, when police finally arrived, a German English-language news website The Local reported. Other people from Gleffe's campsite also joined him and ferried people back to the mainland with their boats.

"Cooperation with the police and rescue crews afterwards was very good, but it all came too late," he said.

When police arrived, Gleffe stopped to think about himself for the first time, he told The Local.

"I was myself so frozen that I had to first warm myself up. I was turning blue," he said.

Meantime, the alleged killer appeared in court Monday , telling a judge that his bomb attack in Oslo and the camp shooting rampage was aimed at saving Europe from a Muslim takeover.

Police revised the death toll downward to 76 from 93, saying eight people were now known to have died in the bomb blast in central Oslo, and 68 on Utoya.

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'Marine massacre': 379 sharks buried at sea

Hundreds of dead sharks illegally fished inside Ecuador's Galapagos National Park were returned to the sea after scientists counted and sampled what one expert called a "marine massacre."

"It was literally like a funeral at sea," University of North Carolina marine biologist John Bruno told msnbc.com. "It was rough and windy and the sun was going down and all 379 sharks were dragged to a gap in the gunwale and eased in the water as the ship slowly moved along.

"They slowly sank — which was for some reason the most powerful aspect of the whole day for a lot of people on board — lots of tears were shed."

Ecuadorian law required that illegally caught fish must be returned to the sea, a prosecutor told Bruno.

Moreover, three of the 30 fishermen arrested —the ship's captain and two crew — were taken with the team for the burial last Saturday "so they could see that we did put all of them into the ocean, i.e., didn't sell them ourselves," Bruno said.

In a blog posting titled "What a marine massacre looks like," Bruno noted that before the burial the team "identified, sexed, and measured every individual (there turned out to be 379 sharks, not 357 as reported earlier). We also took samples for genetic and demographic analysis (very little is known about the biology of some of these species).

"It took 10 hours," he added, "and was grueling and very dangerous work. (There were lots of knives, hooks, and other sharp objects around, the sharks are very heavy and the deck of the ship was extremely slippery.)

"Beyond that, it was one of the most depressing and intense days of my life. It felt like we were unearthing a mass grave in a war zone. The bodies of the sharks were literally coming out of a dark hold beneath the deck as if they were being unearthed."

Bruno said the fact that the sharks' dorsal fins were "nearly cut off, but just hanging on by a thin piece of tissue," suggests they were being harvested for their fins. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in Asia.

The prosecutor with the team "told me the whole sharks would go for about $2,000 each" in the ship's homeport of Manta, Ecuador, Bruno added.

All the sharks were from species (bigeye thresher, blue, Galapagos, hammerhead, tiger and mako) listed as vulnerable or near threatened.

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As tragic as last week's seizure was, Bruno said illegal shark fishing is practiced globally.

"This happens every day somewhere in the world," he said. "In fact, this was a pretty small scale operation."

The crew will face criminal charges, park officials have said, since shark fishing, and any commercial-scale fishing, is illegal inside the park and its marine reserve.

In the Galapagos, illegal shark fishing and finning — the act of cutting off the fins — took off in the late 1990s when the local sea cucumber fishery collapsed.

The Galapagos, an island chain made famous by Charles Darwin and his "Origin of Species," was declared a U.N. World Heritage site in 1979.

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