WORLD IN BRIEF

Officers Upset With Rumsfeld Aided Probe of CIA Prisons

BRUSSELS -- U.S. intelligence officers angry at former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said Tuesday.

Swiss Sen. Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said that senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorism suspects and that they had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity. Marty was defending his work against complaints that it was based on unnamed sources.

The report, issued last month, said the CIA ran secret jails in Poland and Romania, with the complicity of those governments, and transported terrorism suspects across Europe on secret flights. Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied the claims.

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europe

· MOSCOW -- A prominent lawyer who challenged the security services' wiretapping of his client is the focus of a criminal investigation, news agencies reported.

Boris Kuznetsov was accused of disclosing state secrets by providing wiretapping evidence to the Constitutional Court, the report said, citing a statement from the Moscow prosecutor's office. Kuznetsov left Russia after a city court ruled last week that a criminal investigation could go forward.

· MINSK, Belarus -- Belarusan President Alexander Lukashenko fired the head of the country's KGB security service and replaced him with the chief of his bodyguard, according to the presidential press service.

Yuri Zhadobin, until Monday the chief of presidential security, replaces Stepan Sukhorenko, who is to be given a new job, the press service said. It gave no details.

· KIEV, Ukraine -- A derailed freight train released a cloud of toxic gas that sent at least 20 people to hospitals. The accident in western Ukraine touched nerves still raw more than two decades after the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Hundreds of people were evacuated and others fled their homes on their own after the Monday derailment.

asia

· BANGKOK -- A motorcycle bomb killed a policeman and wounded 18 people Tuesday in Thailand's rebellious Muslim-majority far south, according to an army spokesman.

Most of the wounded were forensic police, soldiers and journalists drawn to the scene by an earlier blast at the site, Col. Acra Tiproch said. The second bomb, triggered by a remote device, was hidden in a motorcycle parked in front of a shop in Yala, Acra said.

· BEIJING -- U.N. inspectors verified that North Korea has shuttered all nuclear facilities at its main atomic complex beyond its sole working reactor, the watchdog agency's chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, said Wednesday.

-- From News Services