BERLIN: A young man lived for many years with a pencil lodged inside his head, said German surgeons who detected the object on a CT scan and safely removed it. The patient, a 24-year-old man from Afghanistan, had complained of impaired vision in his right eye, headaches and a discharge from his right nostril. Asked how the pencil had become lodged in his head, he said he only remembered a childhood accident about 15 years earlier where he fell and suffered a strong nosebleed. Surgeons spotted the 2.7-inch pencil, which had lodged in the back of the throat and damaged the eye socket, in a Computerised Tomography scan. After the surgery, the unnamed patient made a quick recovery and was released from hospital within days, although the man’s vision remained impaired.
Police snare French ‘most wanted’
PONTAULT-COMBAULT: French police yesterday captured the country’s most-wanted man in a hotel outside Paris six weeks after he dynamited his way out of prison in a spectacular jailbreak. Redoine Faid, a famed 41-year-old career thief who had been serving time for robbery and risked a heavy new sentence over the 2010 death of a policewoman, was arrested in the early hours at a hotel in Pontault-Combault, about 20km east of central Paris. Police said he was arrested with a 29-year-old accomplice and that weapons were seized in his room and in his car, suggesting Faid may have been preparing another heist. Faid used explosives to blast his way out of the Sequedin penitentiary during his April 13 jailbreak and, armed with a pistol, briefly took four guards hostage before escaping in a waiting getaway car. All the hostages were released unharmed.
Girls win rape cases
NAIROBI: A Kenyan High Court has ordered police to reinvestigate complaints of rape by 11 girls in a landmark case brought by a children’s charity on behalf of more than 240 victims of child rape, some of them as young as three years old. Mercy Chidi, who runs the Ripples International children’s charity in Meru, Kenya, filed a petition on behalf of the girls, who came to the charity for help after being raped by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, police officers and neighbours. The police rarely investigated their complaints, even locking one girl in a cell after she reported one of their colleagues had raped her, Chidi said. Police who failed to enforce the law now risked arrest, fines and imprisonment, said a lawyer for the girls.
New Bulgaria PM
SOFIA: Bulgaria’s parliament yesterday confirmed economist Plamen Oresharski as new prime minister to head a Socialist-backed anti-crisis cabinet of technocrats, ending a post-election stalemate in the EU’s poorest country. Oresharski won support from 120 out of the 217 lawmakers present in the divided 240-seat parliament, with 97 opposed. “The country is in a deep institutional crisis, continuing economic depression and worsening disintegration of society,” the 53-year-old finance professor said.
Agencies
