WORLD IN BRIEF

Besides Posada, sentences were handed down against Cuban Americans Gaspar Jimenez, Guillermo Novo and Pedro Remon, as well as Cesar Matamoros, a Cuban resident of Panama.

Posada, accused of being the ringleader, and Jimenez were sentenced to eight years for endangering public safety and falsifying documents, the Supreme Court said. Novo, Remon and Matamoros were sentenced to seven years for endangering public safety.

The five were exonerated of the most serious charge facing them, possession of explosives. Posada asserted that the group was framed by Cuban security police.

Posada's driver received four years as an accomplice.

• SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Rioting inmates at the overcrowded Urso Branco jail have killed at least six prisoners, decapitating two of them and brandishing their heads from the prison wall, the prison director said. They also hurled the mutilated corpses from the walls.

EUROPE

• MADRID -- A Spanish High Court judge asked the United States to hand over documents on the death of a Spanish cameraman killed in a U.S. tank attack on a Baghdad hotel during the Iraq war.

The court agreed last October to a request from relatives of Telecinco journalist Jose Couso, 37, to investigate his death. The relatives want three U.S. soldiers put on trial in the April 8, 2003, incident.

Judge Baltasar Garzon sent a formal request to the Defense, State and Justice departments for copies of all the information they have on the case, according to a court document.

A Reuters cameraman was killed in the same attack. A Pentagon report absolved the soldiers, who said they had thought a spotter was directing enemy fire from the building.

• STOCKHOLM -- Swedish police raided flats in Stockholm and the port city of Malmo to arrest four men suspected of links with Islamic extremism "outside Europe" and of planning attacks, authorities said.

No details were released officially about the suspects' nationalities, but Swedish station TV4 said the four were 25 to 35 years old and had Middle Eastern origins.

THE MIDDLE EAST

• AMMAN, Jordan -- Police killed three terror suspects in a shootout in the Jordanian capital, authorities said. Working on a tip, police stormed a hideout in east Amman where the suspects had been hiding, the police said in a statement.

A security official said the three killed were believed to have links to a terrorist group that had plotted to attack the prime minister's office and Jordan's secret service with a chemical bomb. The plot, disclosed this week, was said to have been foiled last month.

Had the bomb exploded, it could have killed at least 20,000 people and wrecked buildings within a half-mile, government officials have said.

The group is also believed to have planned to attack the U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic missions with poison gas, officials have said. Police arrested most of its members in two raids.

AFRICA

• GENEVA -- Sudan has granted permission for U.N. human rights investigators to visit the troubled region of Darfur to probe charges of ethnic cleansing, a U.N. spokesman said.

-- From News Services