Fugitives

Months before the body of a beaten 6-year-old boy was found on the floor of his home last week, strong evidence existed to suggest that he was the victim of sustained abuse at the hands of the man now accused of killing him, according to documents obtained by The Times. Authorities on Wednesday issued a murder warrant for Marcas Fisher, who police believe beat his ex-girlfriend's son, Dae'von Bailey, to death a week ago.

Ryan Dallas Cook was homeward bound on his motorcycle on an October night in 2005 when he clipped a stalled, darkened SUV that had rammed into a concrete barrier on the 55 Freeway, an impact that hurled him to the pavement, where he was hit by several passing cars and died. Police said the driver of the SUV was a Hyundai executive who had allegedly spent a long night drinking.

Narcotics agents said Tuesday they had little doubt that the nearly 90,000-acre La Brea fire was started by Mexican drug traffickers who were tending a large, sophisticated marijuana farm planted on the side of a mountain. The growers apparently fled as firefighters approached the source of the fire and are still at large, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. Their abandoned site was similar to other illicit plots planted by Mexican nationals and discovered by drug agents in recent years.

With the state Legislature forced to make dramatic cuts in the prison budget and a three-judge federal panel having recently ordered California lawmakers to release as many as 40,000 inmates in response to the scandalous overcrowding of the California state prison system, it seems like an especially inauspicious time for the L.A. County district attorney's office to be spending some of our few remaining tax dollars seeing if it can finally, after all...

An alleged Whittier gang member wanted in an attack on two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies nearly nine years ago has been arrested in Mexico, authorities announced Monday. Emigdio Preciado Jr., who had been listed as one of the FBI's 10 most wanted, was arrested Friday night in the rural town of Corral Piedras, officials said. The community is in Nayarit state, along Mexico's central coast. He was arrested by Mexican federal police after a tip by U.S. authorities.

The day before Cpl. Cesar A. Laurean fled amid the search for a pregnant Marine who had accused him of rape, he told his wife that the woman was dead, according to a sheriff's affidavit. Christina S. Laurean waited a day before telling police. At the time, authorities were searching for Lance. Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, who had accused Cpl. Laurean of twice raping her. She had been missing 27 days.

For more than two decades, Imad Mughniyah was among the most wanted terrorists on Earth, a top Hezbollah commander with close ties to Iranian intelligence, pursued by the United States, Israel and other nations for attacks that killed hundreds of their civilians and soldiers. Known as the Fox, Mughniyah was a frustratingly elusive figure to his pursuers -- accused of many acts of terrorism, convicted of none.

Jason Vonstraussenburg worked at UC Santa Barbara for 14 years, a skilled technician who could whip together repairs on complicated pieces of lab equipment when scientists needed them in a hurry. At 61, he was a genial colleague, a homeowner, an avid metal sculptor, a father, a husband and a registered Republican. He was everything, police said, except Jason Vonstraussenburg.

The long hunt for a man regarded as one of the world's most notorious arms dealers climaxed Thursday in Bangkok, Thailand, where an eight-month sting operation by a team of U.S. agents led to the capture and arrest of Russian businessman Viktor Bout during an alleged attempt to supply Colombian rebels with weapons and explosives. Bout was taken into custody by Thai police at a luxury hotel in Bangkok, where, U.S.

If Al Qaeda strikes the West in the coming months, it's likely the mastermind will be a stocky Egyptian explosives expert with two missing fingers. His alias is Abu Ubaida al Masri. Hardly anyone has heard of him outside a select circle of anti-terrorism officials and Islamic militants. But as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, investigators say, he has one of the most dangerous -- and endangered -- jobs in international terrorism.