Confessions

The alleged gunman captured in last month's Mumbai attacks had originally intended to seize hostages and outline demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media, according to his confession obtained Saturday. Ajmal Amir Kasab said he and his partner, who massacred dozens of people in the city's main train terminus, had planned a rooftop standoff, but abandoned the plan because they couldn't find a suitable building, the statement to police says.

An Italian couple have confessed to killing four neighbors, including a toddler, after a feud over noise, a prosecutor said. Raffaella Castagna, 30, her 2-year-old son, her mother and a neighbor were found with their throats slit Dec. 11 in Castagna's apartment in the wealthy northern town of Erba. The home had been set on fire. This week police arrested Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi, a middle-aged couple with no criminal record who live in the same building.

In a monotone, Army Pfc. Corey Clagett confessed his crimes in clinical detail Thursday and said he was profoundly sorry for what he had done. Wearing a dress green uniform, his eyes downcast, Clagett told a military court that he conspired with two other U.S. soldiers in May to murder three unarmed Iraqi men they had taken prisoner. He shot two of them, he said quietly. He and his comrades staged a phony crime scene, then lied about it all.

Officials here Tuesday linked a pair of deadly bombings last month to a group they said was composed of Syria-backed Sunni Arab veterans of the Iraq insurgency. Lebanese government officials said Tuesday that four Syrian nationals belonging to Fatah al-Islam, a self-proclaimed Sunni militant group, had been arrested and confessed to the bombings that killed three people in a mostly Christian district in the mountains overlooking the capital.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Kuwaiti national who is thought to be the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, told a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last weekend that he was responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Mack Ray Edwards walked into the Los Angeles Police Department's Foothill station on March 6, 1970, and said he wanted to clear his conscience. The 51-year-old heavy-equipment operator calmly told a detective that he had molested and killed six children over two decades across Los Angeles County. Edwards was arrested, pleaded guilty to three of the slayings and was sentenced to death. Before he was sent to San Quentin, he made an even more startling admission: He had actually killed 18 children.

A veteran Al Qaeda operative has confessed to being the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole, as well as a key conduit between Osama bin Laden and a terrorist cell in East Africa, according to a transcript of a military tribunal hearing released Monday by the Pentagon. Walid bin Attash has long been suspected of playing a key role in the bombing of the Cole as it refueled in Yemen. The attack killed 17 U.S. sailors and nearly sank the $1-billion guided-missile destroyer.

LOUIS Bostich went to Mt. Shasta and prayed. Sober for about a year, he found himself reaching for the bottle again. And he knew why. It was the same reason he drank away a promising Navy career, a string of other respectable jobs and his only meaningful relationships. He was thinking of what he did to Jami Vitteli. Bostich never told anyone what happened. Not his father, who raised him after his mother died of an aneurism when he was 5. Not his friends or U.S. Navy shipmates.

The physical evidence that implicated former pro boxer Iwao Hakamada in the stabbing deaths of a family of four on a summer night in 1966 was hardly conclusive. The clothes prosecutors said he had worn during the killing did not fit him. The murder weapon Hakamada allegedly used was, according to his lawyers, too small to make the wounds. And, they said, the door police claimed Hakamada used to enter and leave the victims' house was locked.

IN 1994, essayist and novelist William H. Gass complained of rampant personal writing in an age of narcissism, condemning the autobiographer for "think[ing] of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and of himself as sufficiently skilled at rendering as to render it rightly." Despite Gass' admonition, confessional writing shows no signs of extinction.