Bomber drops appeal

Bomber drops appeal

EDINBURGH, Scotland — The only man found guilty in the 1988 airplane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, is dropping his appeal, his lawyers said Friday — removing an obstacle to his possible transfer to Libya but disappointing activists who believe he is innocent.

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s lawyer, Tony Kelly, said his client, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, filed papers to drop his appeal because his health had deteriorated.

The former Libyan secret service agent was convicted for the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, which killed 270 people — most of them Americans. It was the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed in Britain.

Missing cargo ship found

MOSCOW — A Russian-manned cargo ship that vanished last month in the Atlantic was found Friday near Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa, according to French and Russian officials. There was no immediate information about the condition of the crew or whether there was anyone else on board.

The Arctic Sea — carrying a load of timber and 15 Russian sailors — disappeared after passing through the English Channel on July 28. The Maltese-flagged freighter sent radio messages as it sailed along the coasts of France and Portugal, but then all contact was lost.

The ship’s crew had reported a June 24 attack in Swedish waters by up to a dozen masked men, who they said tied them up, questioned them about drug trafficking, beat them and searched the freighter before leaving 12 hours later in a high-speed inflatable boat.

Shoot-outs kill 13 in Gaza

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Islamic radicals from an al-Qaida-inspired group battled Hamas security in the Gaza Strip on Friday in shoot-outs that killed at least 13 people.

The fighting began when Hamas forces surrounded a mosque in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where about 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah, or the Soldiers of the Companions of God, were holed up, including some armed with suicide belts and rifles, according to residents of the area.

The confrontation was triggered when the leader of the group defied Gaza’s Hamas rulers by declaring in a Friday prayer sermon that the territory was an Islamic emirate.

‘Squeaky’ Fromme freed

FORT WORTH, Texas — Locked behind bars for more than half her life, a disciple of Charles Manson who was convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975 walked out of a Fort Worth prison Friday morning.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 60, was released from the Federal Medical Center, Carswell about 8 a.m., prison public information officer Dr. Maria Douglas said in a statement.

The woman who once shaved her head and gouged an “X” into her forehead as a show of fervent devotion to Manson, the mass murderer and cult leader, will remain under the supervision of the U.S. Parole Commission.

3 years for ‘fight club’

SAN ANTONIO — A man convicted of helping run what police called a “fight club” that set developmentally disabled residents of a state-run center against one another was sentenced to three years in prison Friday.

A Nueces County jury spared Jesse Salazar the maximum punishment in the abuse scandal that surfaced with cell-phone videos of employees at the Corpus Christi State School provoking residents into fights.

Salazar, who no longer works at the facility, was convicted this week of intentionally causing injury to a disabled person. He had faced up to 10 years in prison.

Controller was on phone

WASHINGTON — An air-traffic controller bantering on the phone about a dead cat at the airport initially failed to warn a small plane of other aircraft in its path and then tried unsuccessfully to contact the pilot, officials said Friday. Moments later, the plane collided with a tour helicopter over the Hudson River, killing nine people.

The controller handling the plane and his supervisor at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at the time of the accident a week ago have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a report that the controller, who has not been identified, cleared the single- engine Piper for takeoff, then made a telephone call. He remained on the phone, including while further instructing the plane’s pilot, until the accident happened.

The phone call, to an airport contractor, was a “silly conversation” concerning a dead cat that had been removed from the airport, a retired union official said, in an account supported by transportation officials also familiar with the contents of the call.

Combined dispatches