■ India
Crime reporter nabbed
A crime reporter has been arrested over a spate of dozens of car thefts and burglaries, accused of using his contacts to move stolen goods, newspapers reported yesterday. Police picked up 42-year-old Sanjay Kumar Singh and three friends in New Delhi after being tipped off they were meeting to plot more car thefts in the capital, The Pioneer reported. Singh covers the crime beat for daily newspapers in Bihar state, which has one of the nation's highest crime rates. Police say he used his contacts to dispose of the cars in Bihar and was involved in at least 56 car thefts and 20 burglaries. No further details were available.
■ Vietnam
Four face firing squad
Four people in Vietnam will face the firing squad, after being convicted of trafficking 132kg of heroin, a court official said yesterday. Husband and wife Nguyen Quang Huy and Nguyen Thi Hong Thuy, and two other men were given the death sentence after a two-day trial that ended Tuesday, said Nguyen Van Nam, an official from Hoa Binh provincial people's court. Huy and Thuy were arrested in Hoa Binh in January and were found to be carrying 15 kilograms of heroin, said Nam. They had been transporting heroin from the province of Son La, which shares a long porous border with neighboring Laos, to their home city of Hai Phong, a gritty port city known to have a raging heroin problem. "The heroin was later sold to dealers in Hai Phong and its neighboring provinces," said Nam. The five defendants who did not receive a death sentence were given jail terms of between four and 20 years, the court official said from the province.
■ China
HK dealers executed
Five drug dealers were executed in Shenzhen for their alleged involvement in a gang that made 31 tonnes of the narcotic ice. The syndicate made its drugs in China and shipped them by boat to the Philippines, Europe and the US. Police confiscated about HK$10 billion (US$1.28 billion) worth of ice, a crystallized form of methamphetamine. Those executed on Wednesday included the gang's ringleader, Chong Cho-shing, nicknamed "Hong Kong Ice King."
■ China
Fishing boats capsize
Six people were killed and 10 others were missing after two overloaded fishing boats capsized and sank in a river in northeastern China that forms the border with Russia. The accident happened Wednesday in Heihe city when the two fishing boats were headed to a small island in the Heilongjiang river to carry out farming work. The boats were built to carry 10 people at most, but were weighed down with 33 people, causing them to overturn on the river. Seventeen people were rescued. China has notified the Russian authorities of the accident and asked them to help search for the missing.
■ Japan
Plant security breached
Officials scrambled yesterday to contain the public relations fallout from reports that confidential information about Japan's nuclear plants had leaked onto the Internet through a virus on a personal computer. Japan's top government spokesman pledged to take steps to protect information after data on several nuclear plants appeared online, including photographs of their interiors, details of regular inspections and repair work and names of workers. Mitsubishi Electric Corp said the information was leaked through a personal computer used by an employee of a Mitsubishi subsidiary that was in charge of inspecting the plants.
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