■ Colombia
Kidnap ringleader arrested
Colombian authorities late Monday announced the arrest of the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping in September last year of eight tourists from Britain, Israel, Spain and Germany in Colombia's remote snowy mountains. Jose Celestino Chamorro, better known as "Parmenio," is a regional leader of the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country's second largest leftist insurgency, police said. Chamorro was arrested along with three other suspects in the northern department of La Guajira, on the border with Venezuela, said Colonel Oscar Naranjo, head of the Judicial Police.
■ United States
Mobster cemetery found
After a week of tearing through concrete and sifting through dirt, FBI agents and police detectives unearthed several human bones and bone fragments on Monday, along with a wristwatch and pair of glasses, in what they believe is an old mob graveyard in a marshy vacant lot in Queens, New York, officials and investigators said. The authorities believe that as many as six gangland murder victims were buried in the lot in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including a Queens furniture store manager who they say was slain in 1980 because he accidentally ran over John Gotti's 12-year-old son, and two men who tried to take over the Bonanno crime family in 1981.
■ United States
Memo warned on rudder
An airplane manufacturer's memo written in June 1997 explicitly describes the hazards of the maneuver that caused the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines plane in Belle Harbor, New York City, but the memo was kept within the company, and the pilot was never warned about the procedure. American Airlines obtained the memo a few months ago from the manufacturer, Airbus, as part of its lawsuit over how the companies will share the payments to the families of the 265 people killed in the crash of Flight 587. The maneuver involved swinging the rudder from side to side.
■ United States
Searcher's dream finds girl
After eight days, Laura Hatch's family had given the 17-year-old up for dead, and Seattle police considered her a runaway. She was found on Sunday, badly hurt and severely dehydrated but conscious, in the back seat of a crumpled car, 60m down a ravine. Hatch, hospitalized in serious condition, was last seen at a party on Oct. 2. Sha Nohr, who found Hatch, is the mother of one of Hatch's friends and had dreams of a wooded area in which she heard the message, "Keep going, keep going."
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