World Briefs

BAGHDAD – An Army sergeant who was due to leave Iraq soon after multiple tours has been charged with murder and aggravated assault in the fatal shooting of five fellow soldiers at a military counseling clinic in Baghdad.

Sgt. John M. Russell was taken into custody outside the clinic following Monday's shooting at Camp Liberty, said Maj. Gen. David Perkins. It was the deadliest case of soldier-on-soldier violence since the Iraq war began in 2003.

HAVANA – Fidel Castro accused Mexico of failing to disclose the spread of swine flu until after US President Barack Obama had visited, as Cuba confirmed its first case of the virus with a young medical student who became ill during a vacation in Mexico.

Castro reacted hours later, writing in a column on a government Web site that "Mexican authorities did not inform the world of the presence (of swine flu), while they waited for Obama's visit."

KABUL – Eleven Taliban suicide bombers attacked government buildings in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, sparking running gunbattles that killed at least 20 people and wounded three US troops. US and Afghan troops freed 20 hostages taken by the insurgents.

TEHRAN, Iran – A joyful Roxana Saberi on Tuesday thanked those who helped win her release after four months in a Tehran prison. Her lawyer revealed that the American journalist was convicted of spying for the US in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the US war in Iraq.

Saberi, who holds American and Iranian citizenship, had copied the report "out of curiosity" while she worked as a freelance translator for a powerful body connected to Iran's ruling clerics, said the lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht.

MUNICH – After three decades of fighting in court, John Demjanjuk was incarcerated Tuesday in a German prison, deported from the United States to face allegations of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp.

JERUSALEM – Israeli newspapers Tuesday were filled with criticism of Pope Benedict XVI accusing the German-born of not expressing enough remorse for the Holocaust. Newspapers lambasted him for failing to apologize for what many in Israel see as Catholic indifference during World War II and the pope's own wartime actions — he served in the Hitler Youth corps and Nazi army — have also cast a shadow.

A Vatican spokesman defended Benedict, saying the pope had mentioned his German roots previously when visiting a German synagogue in 2005 and at the Auschwitz death camp in 2006.