Prisoners England

An enraged crowd outside a courthouse in Liverpool tried Monday to attack two 10-year-old boys accused in the brutal killing of 2-year-old James Bulger--a crime that has stunned and outraged Britain. Six persons were arrested when members of the crowd of 300 screamed profanities and rushed two police vans taking the boys back to a detention center after the youngsters appeared in court.

Ronnie Biggs, the ailing former fugitive serving a sentence for Britain's "Great Train Robbery," returned to prison after spending two nights in a London military hospital. Biggs, who spent more than three decades on the run before returning to England in May, left Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he had received an emergency blood transfusion and undergone medical tests. He was taken back to the medical wing of top-security Belmarsh Prison in southeastern London.

Los Angeles Chileans who suffered abuses under military rule cheered the British court ruling Wednesday that former dictator Augusto Pinochet is not immune from prosecution for human rights atrocities, but were disappointed by the limitations it imposed on the bid to extradite him to Spain.

Britain's most notorious female prisoner lost her bid for freedom, as five law lords unanimously ruled that a life sentence was justified for her participation in murdering children. Myra Hindley, 57, has been in prison 35 years, convicted of helping her lover, Ian Brady, murder a 10-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy. She also was convicted as an accessory in a third killing and confessed to two other murders but was not prosecuted.

When Francisco Letelier came to Washington, he thought his family was finally safe from the soldiers who ousted Chile's democratic government and held his father at a bleak island prison. That assurance vanished in 1976, when he was pulled out of high school to find that his father, Chilean pro-democracy exile leader Orlando Letelier, was killed a mile from the White House by a car bomb. An American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, died with him.

Declaring there was "no hatred or rancor in my soul," Gen. Augusto Pinochet for the first time publicly lamented violence during his rule of Chile, saying in a letter that he shares the pain of those who suffered. The letter, sent from the London residence where Pinochet remains in custody, contained language unusual for the 83-year-old former dictator, whose regime left a legacy of more than 3,000 people killed for political reasons.

Augusto Pinochet faced continued detention in Britain after the former Chilean dictator's opponents won a legal battle in their attempt to ensure that he stands trial on torture charges. The London High Court said it would consider the merits of a case put forward by Belgium and six human rights groups that oppose Britain's ruling that Pinochet, 84, is medically unfit to stand trial and should be allowed to return home to Chile.

Inmates at seven British prisons rebelled against their guards in a spate of incidents aimed at showing solidarity with a group of prisoners who have occupied the Strangeways Prison in Manchester for eight days. The spreading disturbances included one at Dartmoor Prison, 180 miles west of London, where a prisoner was found dead in his cell after inmates surrendered. Besides Dartmoor, new disturbances were reported at Bristol, Stokeheath, Pentonville, Brixton, Hull and Cardiff.

The last five holdout inmates at Strangeways prison surrendered Wednesday, ending a 25-day takeover of the prison nine hours after a raiding party cornered them on the roof. The Home Office, which oversees the nation's 125 penal institutions, opted to use force to end Britain's longest prison siege after lengthy negotiations failed. The uprising at the prison in Manchester, 200 miles northwest of London, erupted April 1 as a protest against overcrowding and squalid conditions.

Six alleged IRA bomb-makers who served long jail terms for terrorism began an appeal of their convictions Tuesday in the latest of a series of reviews shaking the foundations of British justice. The hearing involving the "Maguire Seven" comes after two earlier embarrassing reverses for the British legal system in cases relating to the Irish urban guerrilla campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Augusto Pinochet faced continued detention in Britain after the former Chilean dictator's opponents won a legal battle in their attempt to ensure that he stands trial on torture charges. The London High Court said it would consider the merits of a case put forward by Belgium and six human rights groups that oppose Britain's ruling that Pinochet, 84, is medically unfit to stand trial and should be allowed to return home to Chile.

The retired general smokes a pipe and has a jolly smile, but he's a die-hard Chilean soldier--unrepentant about the past and angry about the present. An old photo in Gen. Alejandro Medina's office shows him wearing the black beret and holstered dagger of the elite paratroops he led during the coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. A photo from this year shows Medina with Pinochet, who looks pale and fragile in a white sweater, in the house outside London where the former dictator remains in custody.

Declaring there was "no hatred or rancor in my soul," Gen. Augusto Pinochet for the first time publicly lamented violence during his rule of Chile, saying in a letter that he shares the pain of those who suffered. The letter, sent from the London residence where Pinochet remains in custody, contained language unusual for the 83-year-old former dictator, whose regime left a legacy of more than 3,000 people killed for political reasons.

Los Angeles Chileans who suffered abuses under military rule cheered the British court ruling Wednesday that former dictator Augusto Pinochet is not immune from prosecution for human rights atrocities, but were disappointed by the limitations it imposed on the bid to extradite him to Spain.

When Francisco Letelier came to Washington, he thought his family was finally safe from the soldiers who ousted Chile's democratic government and held his father at a bleak island prison. That assurance vanished in 1976, when he was pulled out of high school to find that his father, Chilean pro-democracy exile leader Orlando Letelier, was killed a mile from the White House by a car bomb. An American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, died with him.

The British government decided Wednesday that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is fit to stand trial and must stay in Britain to face extradition proceedings on charges of torture, kidnapping and other crimes against humanity brought by a Spanish judge. The decision by Home Secretary Jack Straw, the country's top law enforcement official, triggered a furor of protest from the Chilean government, which recalled its ambassador in protest, and from the powerful Chilean army.

Asil Nadir, who recently ranked among Britain's ultra-rich, spent a third night in jail Monday after failing to post bail of $3.9 million on charges of theft and false accounting stemming from the collapse of his Polly Peck empire. Nadir, arrested when he returned Saturday from a business trip to Turkey, has until Jan. 28 to come up with the cash.

Britain's Court of Appeal was ordered to review the convictions of four alleged Irish Republican Army guerrillas jailed 14 years ago for bombings of pubs. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd said he is reopening the case after a campaign supported by church leaders, former Cabinet ministers and two senior judges who said new evidence showed the four may be innocent.

Patrick Nicholls, a frail British pensioner, walked free Friday after serving 23 years in jail for a murder that never happened in what may be the longest-running miscarriage of justice in British legal history. "They've stolen a third of my life, haven't they? What else can I say? . . . It's been a long haul, a long fight," said Nicholls, 69, quiet and on the verge of tears throughout a news conference here.

Roisin McAliskey is 25 years old, seven months pregnant and in jail. She may be Britain's most contentious prisoner, and--being her mother's daughter--she has become an incendiary symbol of Irish republican protest against British rule in Northern Ireland. Deja vu. It is nearly three decades since Bernadette Devlin catapulted her firebrand mixture of Irish nationalism and socialism from the angry, divided streets of Northern Ireland to international prominence.