Egypt

Official: U.N. inspectors make visit to laboratory

U.N. nuclear inspectors toured an Egyptian laboratory during a review of the country’s fuel programs prompted by irregularities in Egypt’s reporting of its nuclear activities, a Western diplomat said Friday.

The diplomat said on the condition of anonymity the tour by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors was part of the agency’s follow-up to revelations that Egypt had dabbled in uranium enrichment and contemplated processing plutonium.

Inspectors would be going back on regular tours in the coming weeks, he said.

Poland

World War II hero dies

Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, a wartime courier for the Polish anti-Nazi resistance and the director of Radio Free Europe’s Polish service during the Cold War, has died, Polish officials said Friday. He was 91.

Nowak-Jezioranski died Thursday in a Warsaw hospital.

He fought in the brief 1939 campaign after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. After Poland’s defeat and occupation, he joined the resistance movement and fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.

He risked his life as a courier between the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Polish underground resistance in German-occupied Poland, completing five trips — including risky parachute jumps.

After the war, Nowak-Jezioranski worked in Munich, Germany, for Radio Free Europe, a U.S.-funded station that broadcast to countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

In 1976, he moved to Washington, where he served as a consultant to the National Security Council. In 1996, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Saudi Arabia

Record Muslim crowd participates in hajj

Over and over, the voice on the loudspeakers urged, “Please walk slowly, please don’t push each other,” and security guards funneled the crowds into manageable streams as thousands of Muslim pilgrims converged on stone pillars Friday to cast pebbles in a rite of purification.

The always incredibly crowded ritual was even more so this year: A record 2.56 million pilgrims are taking part in the annual hajj pilgrimage, a half-million more than the previous high, set in 2003, the Interior Ministry said.

“It was really crowded down there. I could hardly breathe,” said Jibran al-Qahtani, a 35-year-old Saudi pilgrim, said after throwing his stones at the pillars, which represent the devil, carrying out one of the main rituals of the hajj.

Mexico City

Fake roadblock used to snag prison workers

Gunmen set up a roadblock just outside a Matamoros penitentiary to abduct and kill six prison employees, a crime that has intensified the government’s fight against drug traffickers, officials said Friday.

Dressed in black and heavily armed, the assailants were able to intercept the victims’ cars as they left work early Thursday without any prison officials becoming suspicious, said Marco Antonio Ramirez, the Tamaulipas state delegate for the federal attorney general’s office.

Matamoros is just across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Two dozen prison guards are being investigated for failing to detect or report the fake roadside checkpoint, he said.

The government has said the killings were likely ordered by drug lords being held in a federal prison near Mexico City after federal police raided it. Authorities said the traffickers had corrupted officials at the La Palma prison and ordered killings inside and outside the facility.

President Vicente Fox has called for “the mother of all battles” to regain control of federal prisons.

Ireland

Court orders retrial in deadly car bombing

The only man convicted in connection with the 1998 car-bombing of Omagh — the deadliest terrorist attack in Northern Ireland history — won the right to a retrial Friday.

The Court of Criminal Appeal in Dublin ruled that Colm Murphy, 52, was wrongly convicted of aiding the Irish Republican Army dissidents responsible for the Omagh attack, which killed 29 people and wounded more than 300.

Murphy was found guilty in January 2002 of supplying two cell phones used by the IRA dissidents to deliver the car bomb to Omagh. He received a 14-year prison sentence.

Murphy’s legal team filed an appeal that specified 45 grounds for possible quashing of the conviction. The appellate court accepted two of those complaints: That the original court mishandled evidence from two Irish detectives, who were found to have added false statements to their handwritten interrogation notes; and the original court had made illegal references to Murphy’s previous convictions.