World Briefs

French police swoop on more suspected Islamists
PARIS – Police arrested 10 suspected Islamist militants in dawn raids across France yesterday after a shooting spree by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman prompted President Nicolas Sarkozy to order a security clampdown, just ahead of an April 22 election.

The DCRI domestic intelligence service, supported by elite police commandos, carried out arrests in the southern cities of Marseille and Valence, two smaller towns in the southwest, and in the northeastern town of Roubaix, a police source said.The raids, which followed Friday’s arrest of 19 suspects, came 13 days after police snipers shot dead 23-year-old gunman Mohamed Merah, who had killed three Jewish school children, a rabbi and three soldiers in a spate of attacks around Toulouse.Insane’ diagnosis ‘worse than death’ – BreivikOSLO – A far-right militant who killed 77 people in Norway last year will use his trial to challenge a diagnosis that he is criminally insane, something that would be ‘worse than death’, excerpts of a letter he wrote showed yesterday.The trial of Anders Behring Breivik, who gunned down 69 at a Labour Party youth camp after detonating a car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight, starts in Oslo on April 16.Breivik has said he committed the attacks on July 22 last year to protect Norway from multiculturalism. They were the worst outbreak of violence there since the end of World War Two. UN: 2.4 million trafficking victimsNEW YORK – The United Nations crime-fighting office said on Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 per cent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.Yuri Fedotov, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told a day-long General Assembly meeting on trafficking that 17 per cent are trafficked to perform forced labour, including in homes and sweat shops.He said N$243bn is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women.Fighting these criminals ‘is a challenge of extraordinary proportions,’ Fedotov said.