Mickeys

Police are quizzing six people over the kidnap of a five-year-old British boy in Pakistan and believe he will be returned safely within hours, Sky News has been told.

Sahil's mother Akila Naqqash at her home in Oldham

One of those being questioned is a taxi driver booked to take Sahil Saeed and his father Raja Naqqash Saeed to the airport ahead of their return to the UK.

Sky’ Asia correspondent Alex Crawford said she believed mobile phones stolen by the kidnappers may have been traced by officers.

She added that it was well known that police in Pakistan had a “reputation for brutality” and had been implicated in previous kidnappings.

Sahil, from Oldham, Greater Manchester, was taken from his grandmother’s house in the Punjab region on Thursday morning by men wielding guns and grenades.

The attackers subjected the family to a six-hour ordeal and are said to have demanded a £100,000 ransom for the boy’s return.

Pakistani police investigator Raja Tahir Bashir said officers were working on leads.

“God willing, we will recover the boy very soon,” he said, declining to give further details.

Crawford said Pakistani police carried out a series of raids during the night.

“Five men were arrested overnight from different parts of Jehlum and there’s a suggestion that they have some links or at least know the kidnappers.

“That’s on top of a sixth man, a taxi driver, the man who was booked by Raja Naqqash Saeed to pick them up from the house in Jehlum and take them to the airport.”

Referring to corruption in the police in Pakistan she added: “The Punjab police are known for their brutality.

“There’s a level of corruption, not only in the Punjab police but also throughout the entire Pakistan police authority.

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Vineyards under threat from government-controlled mining company.

Government-controlled mining company, African Exploration Mining and Finance Corporation (AEMFC) (Ltd) has applied to the Department of Mineral Resources for the right to explore several areas of both Stellenbosch and Tygerberg for ore.

Some of the main wineries likely to be affected include Jordan Estate, Mooiplaas, Zevenwacht and De Grendel and the area concerned also covers a great deal of the Bottelary Hills Renosterbos Conservancy as well. Tielman Roos, owner of Mooiplaas and the chairperson of the Bottelary conservancy area, said he was concerned about the application from an ecological and tourism point of view, whilst George Sieraha, chairman of the Durbanville Community Forum, expressed the fear that the application was an attempt to expropriate land for low-cost housing by stealth.

In a statement issued yesterday, chairman of the prestigious Cape Winemakers Guild, Johan Malan from Simonsig, was strongly opposed to any such development at all. He pointed out that not only would the proposed mining activities destroy the UNESCO registered Bottelary Hills Renosterbos Conservancy and the vineyards that attract large numbers of tourists to South Africa every year; it would also result in the loss of employment and income for a great many families working on the wine farms in these areas.

Malan goes on to say ‘Pristine and unique terroir coupled with great winemaking skills are the usual credentials for great wines and mining in the winelands will damage the reputation of South African wines in the international market. The long term benefits of protecting the natural beauty of the winelands will far outweigh the short term advantages of mining.’

Gary Jordan, whose farm is one of those threatened by the proposed exploration, has set up a Facebook page Stop Mining Our Winelands to garner support and share information. All protests and comments from interested and affected parties must be registered by 9th March 2010 and all information on how to do so is available on the page.

taken from News24

Today is Friday, March 5, the 64th day of 2010. There are 301 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1496 – England’s King Henry VII commissions John and Sebastian Cabot to discover new lands.
• 1684 – Holy League of Linz is formed by Holy Roman Empire, Poland and Venice against the Turks.
• 1770 – Crowds and British troops clash in Boston, an incident that becomes known as the Boston Massacre and hastens American Revolutionary War.
• 1798 – French forces occupy Bern, Switzerland.
• 1867 – An abortive Fenian uprising against English rule takes place in Ireland.
• 1868 – US Senate is organised into a court of impeachment to decide charges against President Andrew Johnson.
• 1933 – The Nazi Party wins 44% of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with Nationalists to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.
• 1939 – The Republican government of Spain flees to France after their forces are cornered by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
• 1946 – Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in United States.
• 1953 – Soviet dictator Josef Stalin dies. Some 2 000 people are crushed to death in the crowd during the funeral.
• 1960 – President Sukarno suspends Indonesia’s Parliament.
• 1962 – European extremists in Oran, Algeria, raid prison and kill several Muslim political prisoners.
• 1966 – British airliner hits Japan’s Mount Fuji, killing all 124 people aboard.
• 1970 – Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty goes into effect after 43 nations confirm ratification.
• 1974 – Ethiopia’s leader Haile Selassie, confronted by continued unrest, agrees to constitutional convention to create new system of elected democratic government.
• 1990 – South Africa sends troops to Ciskei homeland to suppress mob attacks on factories and shops after military coup there ousted authoritarian president.
• 1991 – Iraq hands over what it says are the last 35 prisoners from the Gulf War.
• 1993 – General Philippe Morillon of France, commander of the UN mission to Bosnia, goes to the city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, and the Serbs halt their attack on the besieged city.
• 1995 – Pierre-Claver Rwangabo, the governor of Rwanda’s southern province Butare, is assassinated in an ambush. The prime minister blames soldiers of the defeated Hutu-led government living in Zaire.
• 1996 – US President Bill Clinton sends sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and technical experts to Israel to help battle a deadly wave of terrorism.
• 1997 – Representatives of North Korea and South Korea meet for the first time in 25 years, for peace talks in New York.
• 1998 – Dozens of soldiers from an elite Colombian counterinsurgency battalion are killed in a surprise attack, one of the Colombian military’s worst defeats by leftist rebels.
• 1999 – International mediators say the strategic town of Brcko in Bosnia, held by Serbs since the start of the Bosnian war, should be transferred to joint Serb, Muslim and Croat control.
• 2000 – Thirty-five years after police beat and bloodied voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, modern-day civil rights activists trace the same path with Bill Clinton – a white Southerner who credited that march for his rise to the presidency.
• 2001 – A stampede breaks out during the annual hajj pilgrimage in Medina, Saudi Arabia, killing 35 Muslims.
• 2002 – Boris Berezovsky, once one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, accuses the Russian Federal Security Services of perpetrating a series of bombings in Moscow in 1999 that was blamed on Chechen terrorists.
• 2003 – Foreign ministers of France and Russia threaten to veto a UN Security Council resolution by the United States, Britain and Spain that declares Iraq had missed its last chance to disarm peacefully.
• 2005 – A team of US and Ethiopian scientists discovers the fossilised remains of what they believe is humankind’s first walking ancestor, a hominid that lived in the wooded grasslands of the Horn of Africa nearly 4 million years ago.
• 2006 – At least 100 000 protesters demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra march to the Thai leader’s office after a boisterous rally accusing him of corruption and abuse of power.
• 2007 – The UN Development Programme says that it suspended its operations in North Korea because Pyongyang failed to meet conditions set by the agency’s board following US allegations that UN aid money was being diverted to Kim Jong Il’s regime.
• 2008 – Police shoot and kill a man armed with explosives who took 10 Australians hostage on a tourist bus in northern China.
• 2009 – In harsh critcism of his successors, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev likens Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party to the worst of the communists he once led and helped bring down.

Thought For Today:
More tears have been shed over men’s lack of manners than their lack of morals – Helen Hathaway, American writer (1893-1932).

info from News24

The SABC was on Sunday tight-lipped over a newspaper report that it has suspended its popular 19:00 newsreader, Mahendra Raghunath.

Mahendra Raghunath

“I refuse to discuss staff issues. It doesn’t help anyone,” said spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago.

“It’s a matter between employer and employee,” he said. Kganyago said he did not see how SABC employee disputes were matters of public interest.

The Sunday Independent reported that Raghunath was suspended in an apparent witch-hunt.

Television news head Amrit Manga reportedly suspected Raghunath of speaking to the media about problems in the news department.

SABC head of the Media Workers Association of South Africa (Mwasa) Themba Gasa told the newspaper that Raghunath was told to “go home and write a letter explaining why he should not be suspended”.

This happened after the Sunday Independent published an article detailing how the public broadcaster’s budget cuts negatively affected its newsroom. Manga allegedly played favourites in the newsroom, given prime time slots to preferred newsreaders, paying some more than others and crushing criticism, the newspaper reported.

Kganyago denied this. “People want to make this a Mahendra versus Amrit issue. It is not,” he told Sapa.

He also denied that financial problems affected the newsroom.

There is nothing wrong with our news,” he said.

Meanwhile, Newsreaders Thembisa Marele and Isabelle de Taisser want to take the SABC to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) after they refused to sign contracts in December when their salaries were cut by 60%, the newspaper further reported.

Kganyago said SABC employees who did several jobs within the broadcaster were asked to give up some of their contracts during the budget cuts, which resulted in lower salaries.

“People earned extra in work time for which they were already paid. We told them you’ve got jobs. Let’s cut the additional work, which corresponds to no more overtime work allowed,” he said.

He however refused to say whether this applied to Marele and De Taisser directly, saying that internal and external processes, including the CCMA, would decide on disputes with employees.

taken from News24

Port-au-Prince – Less than one month before Haiti’s devastating earthquake, geologist Claude Prepetit gave the latest in a string of warnings that the “big one” was coming. No one listened.

But now he has a fresh message for the authorities after 20 years of shouting into the void – evacuate Port-au-Prince or risk another disaster on scale of the January 12 quake which killed at least 150 000 people.

“We are sitting on a powder keg,” Prepetit, an engineer from the Haitian Mines and Energy bureau, told AFP.

“We are faced with the threat of future earthquakes and have to decentralise, and depopulate Port-au-Prince.”

Prepetit said in an article in the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste less than a month before the quake that “we have entered an apparent lull during which the energy has continued to accumulate in the ground, and the day when it cracks the consequences will be catastrophic for the region”.

For years he has pushed his ideas at schools, universities and conferences, explaining the slow shearing of the American and Caribbean continental shelves which made the tremor inevitable.

“Even in Los Angeles they are waiting for the big one but they don’t know when,” he says.

He pushed in vain for the government to buy seismological equipment capable of detecting the movements imperceptible to humans that would precede a big quake.

“The government listened to me but they had other priorities,” he said, referring to the meagre resources available to the authorities of the poorest nation in the Americas.

The last catastrophic earthquake to hit Port-au-Prince was in 1770, and with the tectonic plates moving by seven milimetres a year along the so-called Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, “over 240 years, that means there is a 1.4-metre gap to make up,” he said.

“It’s simple mathematics: a rupture of that size corresponds to a 7.3-magnitude quake,” he said. The quake that eventually hit was 7.0.

While the US Geological Survey says there is a 25% risk of aftershocks of a magnitude of 6.0 for a month after the quake, Prepetit is worried the 250km fault there has not been ruptured to the east of the capital, with only about a fifth of its length having cracked.

He fears the rupture could repeat in the north of the country, where there is another fault just below the town of Cap Haitien, home to 300 000 people.

Faced with these risks, Prepetit believes that the government “must depopulate Port-au-Prince, where there are two million people, 26% of the Haitian population” and move them onto dozens of shantytowns on 500 square kilometres of designated safe ground outside the capital.

“It is necessary to think of Haiti as a whole and not just of the ‘republic of Port-au-Prince’. It is necessary to take time to rebuild the capital and to locate people in the provinces, while creating infrastructure and jobs to keep them there,” he said.

Priorities also include improving construction standards, which are non-existent in the capital, and educating a population that is familiar with hurricanes and floods but has long forgotten the risk of earthquakes.

“Education can save people, and ignorance can kill,” Prepetit said.

When his house started to shake like a leaf on January 12 the geologist had his wits about him and took shelter beneath a doorframe, he says.

But he admitted that during those 16 seconds which seemed to last an eternity he said that he, like millions of other Haitians, ended up praying: “No, my God, no!”

taken from News24

Two victims of the September 11 attacks have been formally identified after DNA tests of human remains from the site of the World Trade Centre.

DNA advances are aiding the quest to identify victims' remains

The two women were identified by referencing DNA from the remains with a database of DNA profiles from victims of the attack, a spokesman for the New York City medical examiner said.

Relatives of the women requested their names not be released.

More than eight years after two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center killing 2,759 people in New York, including the 10 hijackers aboard the planes, 8,976 human remains are still being tested in order to be linked to a victim.

Of the 21,744 remains uncovered since 2001, 59% have been identified, corresponding to 1,626 of the 2,749 dead.

The victims whose remains were not matched to remains received a death certificate stating they were homicide victims, but the body had not been found.

Remains can be identified through markings such as tattoos, dental X-rays or DNA testing, among other things.

Ellen Borakove, a examiner’s office said improvement in DNA testing were aiding their efforts: “One by one, the numbers (of identifications) are going up. We are constantly working to identify the remains.”

Since January 2006, 25 victims were matched to remains, while 27 DNA profiles from remains have still not been linked to a known victim.

taken from SkyNews

The Cadbury board has warned that Kraft is “trying to buy Cadbury on the cheap” as it advised shareholders to reject the £10.1bn hostile takeover bid.

Workers at the Cadbury factory in Bournville are banding together to fight off a hostile £10bn takeover bid from Kraft.

Kraft, who make Toblerone and Oreo biscuits, earlier decided to bypass the Cadbury board and make its offer directly to shareholders.

But Cadbury chairman Roger Carr warned shareholders to reject the US food giant’s attempt to acquire the British company.

“Kraft is trying to buy Cadbury on the cheap to provide much needed growth to their unattractive low-growth conglomerate business model.

“Don’t let Kraft steal your company with its derisory offer.”

Business secretary Lord Mandelson has told Kraft if it tries to “make a fast buck” out of Cadbury it will meet with stiff opposition from the Government.

In September, Kraft – whose brands also include Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Kenco coffee – said a merger with Cadbury would create a “global powerhouse”.

It said it hoped to keep open Cadbury’s Somerdale facility near Bristol, which is currently scheduled to close, and invest in the firm’s Bournville factory near Birmingham.

Cadbury upped long-term performance targets and said profit margins were expected to be higher than originally thought – as it tried to outline a future as an independent company.

It said its average growth per year from 2007 to 2009 will be 6% and that all three categories of its business “continue to deliver good results”.

But the board’s rejection of the Kraft bid comes amid reports that it is in talks with US food firm Hershey over a rival offer that will offer more cash for the shares.

Cadbury is said to be looking for a price of at least 850p a share before even opening discussions, compared to the 714p per share offered by Kraft.

taken from SkyNews

Google is to limit the number of news articles users can read for free on its website.

Google is facing pressure over its free news provision

The search engine said it was changing its First Click Free programme so that readers would not be able to look at more than five pages in one day.

The move follows scathing criticism of Google by Rupert Murdoch over the way it provides free access to newspaper articles in his News Corp media group.

Some users have been able to get around paying subscriptions or registration by accessing news articles through Google.

But after the changes, users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages, Google said..

Google’s senior business product manager Josh Cohen said: “Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free.

“Now, we’ve updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.”

Mr Murdoch had threatened to block Google access to his newspaper websites.

He has accused news aggregators of “feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others”.

“To be impolite it’s theft,” he said.

“Good journalism is an expensive commodity.”

Mr Murdoch says he intends to extend charging for access to some of his newspapers on the web.

The Wall Street Journal has already moved behind a pay-wall.

“We intend to expand this pay model to all our newspapers in the News Corp stable: the Times of London, The Australian, the rest,” he said.

“Some critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will.”

taken from SkyNews

Johannesburg – There was relief as South Africa emerged from its first recession in 17 years in the third quarter of 2009 by notching up 0.9% growth, driven by a rebound in the manufacturing sector which had been sent reeling during the worst times.

The figures were in line with consensus expectations. Though the consensus was for positive growth, individual economists differed widely in their forecasts, because of uncertainty over revisions by Statistics in the way gross domestic product (GDP) is calculated.

The revisions led to first-quarter GDP being revised downwards to a negative growth rate of 7.4% from negative growth of 6.4% previously. (All figures are quarter-on-quarter, seasonally adjusted and annualised growth rates, unless otherwise stated.)

However, despite the sharp downward revision in the first quarter, economists don’t expect the overall GDP growth rate for the year as a whole to be materially different from the anticipated -2% levels. (continue reading…)

2009 is coming to an end and we’re wondering who had the biggest influence on the news in 2009?

Who’s your news maker of 2009?

What do you recon was the news story/occurence for 2009?

Heavy metallers Metallica have stumped up $50,000 to find a blue-eyed, blonde-haired student who disappeared at one of their concerts.

James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica are helping search for Morgan

Dressed in black boots, a black skirt and a black Pantera t-shirt, Morgan Harrington was waiting with her friends for the kings of dark music to come on stage.

But, just before 9pm, the 20-year-old went to the toilet and ended up outside the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Virginia.

She called her friends to say staff were refusing to let her back inside and told them she would make her own way home, according to MSNBC.com.

That was 10 days ago on Saturday October 17 – she has not been seen since.

Morgan had been studying at Virginia Tech University where 32 people were massacred by a gun-wielding student in 2007.

The FBI is trying to discover what happened to the girl, who is described as “open, beautiful, artistic and giving”.

Morgan disappeared on Oct 17

Metallica’s $50,000, announced on the website findmorgan.com, adds to the $100,000 being offered by Morgan’s parents Daniel and Gil, bringing the total reward to $150,000 (£91,777).

The cash will go to anyone who returns Morgan to her parents or can provide information leading to the arrest of whoever is behind her disappearance.

Gil Harrington, Morgan’s mother, told MSNBC’s Today television programme: “One word that comes to mind when you think of Morgan is ’shiny’. She radiated life.”

Morgan was not carrying ID or a mobile phone when she went missing, a news article on Metallica’s website said.

Under the headline ‘One Of Our Fans Is Missing’ the band wrote: “We are deeply concerned about the disappearance of 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington.”

The metallers are asking everyone who attended the show to check camera footage and photos to see if they can spot anyone resembling Morgan.

taken from SkyNews

The Irish dad of a two-year-old girl feared to have been abducted in New Zealand has spoken of his grief as the search continues for his daughter.

Two-year-old Aisling Symes disappeared from her late grandmother's house

Aisling Symes disappeared on Monday as her mother was clearing out the home of her late mother in a quiet Auckland neighbourhood.

A thorough police search of the area failed to locate the little girl, and over 40 detectives are now working on the case.

They now believe she has probably been abducted.

Aisling’s father Alan, originally from County Waterford, made an emotional appeal for anyone with any information to speak to police.

“These recent days have proven to be the most harrowing of our lives,” he told a news conference.

“No sleep, we feel like we’re barely existing. Sort of surviving every moment, not knowing where Aisling is.

“Is she near us? Or has she been moved far away? Is she being treated well? Things like, has her nappy been changed?

“These thoughts churn through us as we huddle close as a family.

“Aisling is our two-year-old daughter, sister to Caitlin, a cousin, a beloved niece and granddaughter.

“We want her back, so please, if you have any information at all, please come forward.”

Following an intensive search of a 3km radius, police are now conducting door-to-door interviews and interviewing known offenders in the area.

They have also put the toddler on border alert in a bid to ensure she is not taken out of the country.

Aisling is tall for her age, with light brown hair, and is believed to be a wearing green jacket, blue jeans embroidered with flowers and white tennis shoes.

Anyone with information should contact New Zealand Police.

story from SkyNews

Pretoria – A physiotherapist from Centurion was attacked by a gang reportedly led by a Tshwane metro police officer on Thursday.

Elaine Cahill, who was trampled on and choked by robbers who attacked her at her parents' smallholding outside Pretoria.

The robbers trampled on her and choked her until she started vomiting blood and left her for dead, but she managed to crawl about 50m to her neighbour’s house for help.

The metro police officer was apprehended in Pretoria West at around 11:30, nearly two hours after the attack on 25-year-old Elaine Cahill at her parents’ home on a smallholding in Raslouw.

On Thursday afternoon, with bruises clearly visible on her body, Cahill tearfully told how two men showed up at the house, pretending they wanted to look at an outbuilding which they wanted to rent.

Two more men showed up a while later.

Two of the men were wearing security guard uniforms.

Cahill took the men to the outbuilding leased out by her parents, Billy and Erna Cahill.

“Just as they were about to pay the deposit, they forced me to the ground and pressed a firearm against my head.

“They said they’d shoot me if I didn’t keep quiet. My hands were handcuffed and they tied my feet together with a belt. Next I was sprayed in the face with pepper spray and then they trampled on me.

“When they were done with that, they wrapped a jacket around my head and choked me with shoelaces,” Cahill related.

“I squeezed two fingers in between my throat and the shoelaces so I could breathe.

“They let go when I started vomiting blood. They left me like that to choke to death.”

According to Cahill, she didn’t move for a while, but then started crawling to her neighbour, Das Pillay’s house, about 50m away.

When she reached the wire fence between the two plots, she was able to free herself and climb over the fence.

In the meantime, the robbers had pressed a firearm against the domestic worker’s head and plundered the house.

They took medals, jewellery, a champagne bottle and a GPS among other things and shoved them in a sports bag.

Pillay phoned the police and a security service. When the robbers heard them approaching, they dropped the sports bag, shot the glass out of a sliding door and fled. They climbed over the wall.

Apparently the security service guards found the metro police officer at the crime scene. He showed them his identification and they let him go.

The metro police officer was implicated by one of two other suspects who were arrested near the crime scene. The police were then warned by radio to be on the lookout for him.

He was apprehended by members of the police’s flying squad at a scrap yard in Pretoria West.

Console Tleane, spokesperson for Tshwane’s department of community safety and liaison, said the metro police officer is believed to have used his service pistol during the incident. He allegedly also supplied his partners with old Coin security company uniforms.

taken from News24

Bees attack crash victims:

A swarm of bees attacked victims and rescue workers after a van carrying the beehives crashed near the Turkish resort of Marmaris.

One person died and more than 20 were injured in the accident.

Emergency services and local beekeepers battled swarms of angry bees for around four hours in an attempt to free two people trapped in the wreckage and protect passers-by.

One of those trapped, Feyzullah Acar, 18, later died in hospital. Ahmet Altiparmak, the regional governor, said that it was not yet known whether he died as a result of injuries sustained in the crash or the effects of the bee stings.

Read article

Killer groupies an unexplained mystery:

Even in his death row cell, satanic serial killer and rapist Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,”receives bags of mail. And of the dozens of people who try to contact him each year, officials say, about 90 percent are women.

It’s not just Ramirez who gets the attention, nor is Scott Peterson alone in the way he attracted admiring women even after he was sentenced to die for killing his wife and unborn child.

Death row prisoners often join the horde of grooms married in group ceremonies such as the one planned Saturday at San Quentin State Prison.

It’s a phenomenon that’s little understood and seldom studied: Women who fall hopelessly in love – or at the least become wildly infatuated – with the most feared killers.

read article

Three Million Gallons Of Raw Sewage:

More than 3 million gallons of untreated waste has been dumped into the Blue River as the result of a sewer line break, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

The DNR issued a violation to Kansas City as a result of the break.

The break, which occurred in Marion Park, released untreated waste into an unnamed stream that travels through a park before draining into the Blue River. After the point where the tributary reaches the Blue River, the river travels for another estimated one mile before reaching Swope Park.

read article

info from DailyRotten

Police have named a man suspected of the murder and rape of a woman in 1979 following the exhumation of his body.

Detectives have revealed the DNA of David Lace, 26, whose remains were dug up last month, matched that of the suspected killer of Teresa De Simone.

Teresa De Simone's mother said she was a "happy girl, but shy"

The 22-year-old victim was found in her car at the pub in Southampton where she worked part-time, in December 1979.

Sean Hodgson, 58, of County Durham, spent 27 years in jail for the murder before his conviction was quashed.

Mr Lace was originally from Portsmouth and, at the time of the murder, he was 17 and living in the city.

He took his own life in December 1988 when he was living in Brixham, Devon. He did not feature in the original police investigation and was not thought to have had prior links to Miss De Simone.

He made admissions to the murder in 1983 following Mr Hodgson’s conviction at Winchester Crown Court some 18 months earlier.

The Ministry of Justice gave permission for Mr Lace’s body to be exhumed from Kingston Cemetery, Portsmouth, after new DNA samples indicated he was the prime suspect in the case.
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