The News Review:
- Detective tells of fears about schoolgirl and policeman
- Guineans reportedly lay claim to Yenga town on border with Sierra…
- Twisted plot of the mercenaries and the oil-rich African dictator
Detective tells of fears about schoolgirl and policeman
The Age – Aug 26, 2004
Picture:AP A highly experienced Tasmanian police officer is a key witness in the trial of a senior Victorian police superintendent accused of sex crimes involving a schoolgirl in Sierra Leone. Mandy Cordwell has told a court in the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, that Superintendent Peter Halloran shared his bedroom with his alleged victim after hiring her as a nanny. Ms Cordwell, 37, had reached the rank of detective sergeant in Tasmania’s police force before she resigned earlier this year and moved to the troubled West African nation to work as a war crimes investigator. Halloran, who is on unpaid leave from the Victoria Police, was her chief in the war crimes unit of the UN-backed Special Court of Sierra Leone, and she and her husband shared a house with him in Freetown’s diplomatic quarter. The 56-year-old career police officer, who once headed Victoria’s homicide squad, has not yet been required to enter a plea in the Freetown court, but his lawyer says he will “absolutely plead not guilty” to unlawful carnal knowledge, indecent assault and procuring a girl under 14 years of age.
Guineans reportedly lay claim to Yenga town on border with Sierra…
Free with registration – Asia Africa Intelligence Wire – AccessMyLibrary.com – Aug 26, 2004
–> COPYRIGHT 2004 Financial Times Ltd. (From BBC Monitoring International Reports) Text of article by Abdul Karim Koroma entitled “Civil Society denies Banda Thomas” published by Sierra Leone newspaper Concord Times on 17 August Contrary to the pronouncement made by internal affairs minister, George Banda Thomas, that the Guineans do not lay any claims to.
Twisted plot of the mercenaries and the oil-rich African dictator
Telegraph.co.uk – Aug 26, 2004
According to local reports this was the coup that everyone seemed to know about. Journalists in Zimbabwe and South Africa were certainly aware that something was up before Simon Mann, the old Etonian former SAS officer and alleged ringleader, was arrested at Harare airport. With him were 69 people accused of acting as mercenaries, many of them former South African army officers, most of whom had just arrived in Harare from Johannesburg on a Boeing 727 bought by Mann, a veteran soldier of fortune in Angola, Sierra Leone and other of the world’s troublespots. All 70 were arrested as they waited for £100,000 of weapons to be loaded on to the aircraft. At first they said they were on their way to the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] to provide security at a diamond mine. But after a series of interrogations by President Robert Mugabe’s security forces, this story changed. According to a statement that had purportedly been obtained from Mann while he was in prison, he had been approached to “escort” Severo Moto, the exiled leader of Equatorial Guinea’s political opposition, from his Spanish home back to the capital, Malabo.