NYPD calls on citizens for amateur video evidence

By Deborah Jian Lee

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Yorkers can soon take a bite out of city crime by uploading video or photo evidence directly to the New York Police Department, in a move welcomed on Thursday by civil rights groups.

"We're putting that technology in place to enable us to do that," said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, adding that the service will be available soon.

"It's a fact of life," Kelly said. "Everybody has a camera in their telephones. When people can record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation, it's helpful."

Soon citizen sleuths can transmit evidence of criminal activity directly to the police and 911, including evidence of police misconduct, such as the recent video of a police officer shoving a bicyclist to the ground in Times Square.

The video of the incident has received over one million views on YouTube and has generated online discussion about police brutality and abuse of power.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said, "I think that while it's appropriate for the police department to invite video reports of wrong doing both by ordinary people and police officers, the New York Police Department has a long way to go to ensure that police officers who engage in wrongdoing like what was captured in the two video tapes that were recently disclosed are held accountable."

Original here

Pictured: Brazilian lover who 'chopped up British girl like beef' grins as he takes police to find her mutilated remains

By Charlotte Gill and Dan Newling

The man accused of murdering and mutilating a British teenager in Brazil yesterday took police frogmen to a remote jungle river to try to find the girl's dismembered remains.

Mohammed Carvalho dos Santos, 20, spent four hours with police divers after he admitted killing 17-year-old Cara Burke, from south London, in a cocaine-fuelled rage.

He has told police he put the body parts in plastic bags and threw them in the river. He had put her torso in a suitcase which he left on the riverbank, and it was the discovery of the case which led to the murder probe and his arrest.

Grinning killer: Mohamed D'Ali Carvalho Santos, centre, leads police to the site where he allegedly dumped some body parts of British teenager Cara Marie Burke

But after the four-hour trawl yesterday, police admitted they had drawn a blank.
Earlier, dos Santos had smiled in silence with his head bowed as he left a police station in the central Brazilian city of Goiania for the river outside the town where he said he had dumped the girl's head, arms and legs.

He responded angrily to the media later while showing police around the river and the 40-yard-long bridge spanning it.

Asked where he was standing on the bridge when he threw bags of body parts over the side, Santos snarled at a reporter, 'I threw her in your house.'

Murdered: British teenager Marie Burke, 17, was reportedly stabbed to death before being decapitated

Firefighters joined police in combing the banks of the river for the missing remains, without success.

Detectives said they were now convinced that dos Santos, 20, carried out the horrific murder because Cara had refused to marry him so that he could gain entry to Britain.

They had earlier believed the motive may have been that Cara had planned to go to the police about his drug use and dealing.

Chief investigating officer Carlos Batista said: 'His friends and her friends have told us that he wanted her to marry him so that he could live permanently in the UK. He had already been there a couple of years and really liked it.

'She was not prepared to marry him and they argued a lot.'

Cara, whom friends described as 'very naive' and 'obsessed with Brazil', is believed to have met dos Santos in east London, where he was living illegally.

When he was thrown out of Britain earlier this year, he suggested Cara travel with him to Brazil, in the hope that the pair would get married and he could obtain British citizenship.

The couple spent three months living together in a flat in the central Brazilian city of Goiania before they fell out. Two weeks ago Cara moved in with a female friend in the city but returned to the flat last weekend.

Grieving: Cara's brother Michael and mother Anne (third left) leave the family home in London

Her boyfriend was born in Brazil, but police said his parents live in the UK, and that he had met Cara in Britain.

They say he quickly confessed to murdering her, and that he had taken pictures of her mutilated body on his mobile phone.

However last night he claimed that he did not kill Cara.

'I was in my apartment when something happened. She got killed there but I can't say what happened. It wasn't me' he said from his cell in a telephone interview with the Sun.

He told the newspaper that he was never romantically involved with Cara. He said she had flown out to be with another Brazilian who had paid for her ticket and was furious that she later ended their relationship.

'He said he was going to kill her because she spent so much on the ticket,' said Dos Santos.

'She moved in with me but she was never my boyfriend [sic]. We lived together for about two months and then she moved out because she had another boyfriend.'

Cara pictured with a young friend

Yesterday Mr Batista, chief of Goiania's murder division, said that dos Santos stabbed Cara 'several times in the chest and the back' last Saturday after taking a huge amount of crack cocaine.

Dos Santos said last night that he does not remember what happened the night Cara died because he was too high on cocaine.

He said: 'I don't remember much, I had used too much drugs.'

A screen projection of a photo of Cara and Dos Santos recovered by police from his mobile phone

After murdering her, dos Santos went out to get drunk at a party, then returned to his apartment and hacked off Cara's head, arms and legs.

He then stuffed the teenager's torso into a medium-sized black suitcase which he dumped in a river outside town. Police believe he had an accomplice named only as Jorge, who was last night being hunted.

He is thought to have helped in the disposal of the body parts, but not in the murder.

Rescue workers search for body parts in the river near where Cara's body was found

The suitcase was discovered last Monday and was identified by a tattoo reading 'Mum'. The rest of Cara's body - including her head - have still not been found.

Shockingly, dos Santos is said to have told detectives dismembering his girlfriend's body was ''just like cutting beef, but for the bleeding.'

When asked what motivated him to dismember the corpse, he said it was his desperation to remove the body from the apartment.

'The best method I could think of was putting her inside the suitcase.'

The 17-year-old's dismembered body was found in the Brazilian city of Goiania

And asked why he took a photograph of the body and the knife, he is reported to have said: 'I took them in order to send to a Brazilian in England, who she stole money from. He said he was going to kill her.

'I was going to send them by email to show him that although he didn't have the courage to do it, someone here did.'

According to the newspaper Hoje Noticia, as well as photographs of the remains, Santos' mobile phone contained pictures of Chucky, the killer doll from the Child's Play series of films.

Liverpool toddler James Bulger's 10-year-old killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, were said to have been influenced by one of the films.

Original here

Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in

By LARA JAKES JORDAN and DAVID DISHNEAU

WASHINGTON -- A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that another of his brothers, Charles, told him Bruce had committed suicide.

A woman who answered the phone at Charles Ivins' home in Etowah, N.C., refused to wake him and declined to comment on his death. "This is a grieving time," she said.

A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins' home in Frederick declined to comment.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr and FBI Assistant Director John Miller declined to comment on the report.

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.

Heine declined to comment on Ivins' death.

Norman Covert, a retired Fort Detrick spokesman who served with Ivins on an animal-care and protocol committee, said Ivins was "a very intent guy" at their meetings.

Ivins was the co-author of numerous anthrax studies, including one on a treatment for inhalation anthrax published in the July 7 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Just last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, who had been identified by the FBI as a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department in which he claimed the department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.

The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analyzing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two U.S. senators, according to the report.

Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.

In January 2002, the FBI doubled the reward for helping solve the case to $2.5 million, and by June officials said the agency was scrutinizing 20 to 30 scientists who might have had the knowledge and opportunity to send the anthrax letters.

After the government's settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said. It quoted a longtime colleague as saying Ivins was being treated for depression and indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide. Family members and local police escorted Ivins away from the Army lab, and his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague told the newspaper. He said Ivins was facing a forced retirement in September.

The colleague declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI, the report said.

Ivins was one of the nation's leading biodefense researchers.

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

In 1997, U.S. military personnel began receiving the vaccine to protect against a possible biological attack. Within months, a number of vaccine lots failed a potency test required by federal regulators, causing a shortage of vaccine and eventually halting the immunization program. The USAMRIID team's work led to the reapproval of the vaccine for human use.

The Times said Ivins was the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist who was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

Original here