Washington, December 12
Usually making headlines with their achievements in this country where they number over 2.5 million, at least four Indian Americans this week made news for crimes - ranging from armed robbery to sending hate mail to former president George Bush to running healthcare fraud schemes.

Anirudh Lakhan Sukhu (43) was sentenced to 255 months in prison, followed by four years of supervised release, for an armed bank robbery and shooting a bank teller in the hand with a shotgun in 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.An Indiana district court judge Friday sentenced a former Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus Vikram Buddhi (38) to 57 months in prison for allegedly making threats against former president George W. Bush.

Two other persons of Indian origin pleaded guilty in connection with multiple health care fraud schemes in Detroit, Michigan. Baskaran Thangarasan (37), a physiotherapist, faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine while 38-year-old Sandeep Aggarwal faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for running a sham health management firm.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the alleged robber, Sukhu with two accomplices robbed the Bank of America in Clarksville, Maryland, on November 20, 2008 and shot a bank employee with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.

Arrested in 2006, Buddhi was convicted by a jury in June 2007 on all counts in an eleven-count indictment. The former Purdue University PhD student was accused of posting a threatening message directed towards Bush and others on a financial web-site message board.In the third case, Thangarasan admitted that between September 2003 and May 2006, his co-conspirators submitted claims to the Medicare programmes totalling approximately $5,055,000 for files that were falsified by him. Medicare actually paid approximately $2,325,000 on those claims.In his plea in the same case, Aggarwal admitted to assisting co-conspirator Suresh Chand in laundering the proceeds of Chand’s Medicare fraud scheme.Chand, who pleaded guilty in September 2009, admitted to conspiring to submit about $18 million in fraudulent physical and occupational therapy claims to the Medicare programme. Aggarwal admitted he and Chand laundered approximately $393,000 through a sham entity called Global Health Care Management Services. — IANS

London, December 12
The estranged husband of Indian-origin woman Geeta Aulakh, whose dismembered body was found on the streets of London on November 16, has been rearrested and is being questioned by the police.

Geeta - who worked as a receptionist with popular Asian radio station Sunrise Radio - was found dead with her right hand severed near a child-minder's house where she had gone to collect her two children Karan and Tejdeep, aged eight and nine.Her estranged husband, 31-year-old Harpreet Aulakh, is one of the two men being held by officers investigating the brutal killing. He was one of 11 men arrested and released on bail some weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Geeta's family has said she had been threatened before her death and was preparing to divorce her husband of 11 years. The Indian-origin owner of Sunrise Radio, Avtar Lit, said she came from a "respectable" family but the "strong-minded" Geeta married against the wishes of her parents Nardesh, a receptionist, and Lakwinder, a warehouse worker. — PTI

Kathmandu, December 12
Amid mounting pressure from international human rights watchdogs, a Nepalese army major accused of torturing a 15-year-old girl to death during the country's decade-long civil war was arrested today, a news report said.

Major Niranjan Basnet, an accused in torturing Maina Sunuwar to death during the Maoists-led insurgency, has been arrested by the Nepal Army’s Military Police on his arrival from New Delhi at the Tribhuvan International Airport today, The Himalayan Times said.

Basnet is one of the four primary accused in Maina Sunuwar’s disappearance, torture and murder in February 2004.

Basnet arrived the capital after the UN expelled him from the peace keeping mission in Chad. However, the whereabouts of Basnet after the arrest is unknown, the report said.

Basnet's arrest comes amid mounting pressure from national and international level human rights activists. The Nepalese court had directed the government to arrest Basnet on January 31, 2008, it said. The court ordered his suspension in September.

The UN rights watchdog and top envoys in Nepal, including the US, the UK and EU, have earlier flayed the government for failing to probe "forced disappearances" in the country during the decade-long Maoists'-led civil war, which ended in November 2006.

Sunuwar died in military custody in 2004 after she was allegedly subjected to torture during interrogation. Her body was later exhumed from an army barracks. — PTI

Lahore, December 12
Five American Muslims, arrested on suspicion of plotting terror attacks, were hauled up just before a scheduled meeting with Al-Qaida operatives and had been spurned by some other Pakistan-based terror groups after they showed keenness to only join ‘jehad’ in Afghanistan.

The five, who have been grilled by the FBI and Pakistani intelligence, have said they wanted to engage in militant activities and were trying to travel to Taliban heartland of Waziristan, a police official said.

“They had contacted one Safiullah, who has links with Al-Qaida and had arranged a meeting with him to go to Waziristan to seek terror training," the official said.

The five were arrested on Wednesday in Sargodha in Punjab and according to local police chief Usman Anwar they were in contact with Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) to enrol themselves but were spurned as they were more interested in going to Afghanistan to fight US forces and not to carry out terror attacks in India.

While the US wants Pakistan to deport the five back for questioning and investigations, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said they would not be deported unless they were cleared by the Pakistani police.

“The US nationals have been shifted to Lahore and handed over to the Joint Investigation Team," Anwar said.

“The team, which includes IT experts, will examine their laptops to recover deleted emails and other records. The team will also ascertain their motive for visiting Pakistan," he said.

The five youths are Waqar Hussain Khan (22), Omar Farooq (24), Ahmed Abdullah Minni (20), Ramy S Zamzam (22) and Iman Hassan Yemer (17).

Khalid Farooq, father of Omar and a US citizen, was also arrested for sheltering the youths.

“In spite of knowing that the five US students were on the watch list of the FBI, Khalid gave shelter to them," said a preliminary investigation report prepared by police.Khan, Minni, Zamzam and Yemer arrived in Pakistan on November 30. Omar, who has a home in Sargodha, arrived a couple of months ago with his father. — PTI

Chicago, December 12
IIT alumnus Vikram Buddhi was yesterday sentenced to four years and nine months in prison and an additional three years of supervised release by a US court for posting hate messages in 2006 against former president George Bush and calling for bombings of American infrastructure.

Indiana court District Judge James Moody said the supervised release would be monitored by a probation officer. Buddhi was arrested in 2006 after being convicted of making threats to Bush, the then Vice President Dick Cheney and their wives, and calling for bombings of US infrastructure.

The 38-year-old PhD student of Purdue University, convicted in 2007, had fired his lawyer yesterday when his sentencing hearing began. He represented himself in the court and said, "The trial was unfair. I am not the kind of person the government is trying to portray". After the sentence, Buddhi - wearing an orange prison jumpsuit - spoke for a little while with his former lawyer. He was then taken into custody and led out of the courtroom.

Meanwhile, in Mumbai, Buddhi’s father sharply reacted to the verdict today, saying the trial was unfair and a "total miscarriage of justice". BK Subbarao, a lawyer and former Navy Captain, also said his son will appeal against the ruling.

"The sentence has come without a straight trial and without any valid indictment because essential facts were not stated in the charges," Subbarao said. "As the indictment was invalid, he should not have been sentenced. Buddhi, who is defending himself in US court, will now file an appeal in the appellate court in Chicago."

Subbarao said the US criminal Procedure laws required essential facts of the offence to be stated in the charges, which was not done in his son's case. He said the first charge against Buddhi states "on or before December 30, 2005 Vikram Buddhi knowingly and willfully threatened to kill George Bush in violation of section 871 of title 18 US code. But nowhere in this charge it was stated how he had threatened. The essential fact was missing and the indictment was invalid. As such, the trial was unfair and sentence should not have been pronounced," Subbarao said.

Subbarao said only during the trial the prosecution had brought before the court the Internet messages in question. "The Supreme Court of the US has laid down that whenever essential fact of the offence is not stated in the charges, no additional document can be brought to support the indictment," he pointed out.

Therefore, in the opinion of US Supreme Court, the indictment must stand or can fall on its own. In the case of Buddhi it fell because the essential fact was missing in the charge, he claimed. Subbarao hoped that Buddhi would get justice in the appellate court. — PTI

Nicosia, December 12
Grave robbers have dug up the coffin of former Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos and stolen his corpse, the police said yesterday.

Mounds of fresh earth lay at the site of the robbery in the Deftera village cemetery in a southwestern suburb of the capital, Nicosia. Police investigators cordoned off the area and were searching the site. The motive was unclear. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the death of Papadopoulos, who was Cyprus' President from 2003 to 2008.

Investigators believe the body was taken either late last night or early this morning. The motive is unclear. Grave-robbing is rare in Cyprus. — AP

New York, December 12
A campaign by Sikhs in America has resulted in the US Army accepting another Sikh recruit for active duty with his religious identity intact. It will be for the first time in 23 years that Sikhs will serve in the US army with their turbans and unshorn hair. Captain Tejdeep Singh Rattan, a dentist, and Captain Kamaljit Singh Kalsi, a doctor, were asked by the army to remove their turbans and cut hair before they could be allowed to join active duty earlier this year.