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Police in Australia believe a lawyer who represented some of the country’s most notorious organised crime figures was the victim of a contract killing.

Joe Acquaro was shot dead in Melbourne in the early hours of Tuesday. Investigators believe underworld bosses may have put a price on his head.

The lawyer was well-known in the city’s Italian community and his body was found outside a cafe he owned.

Clients included crime bosses accused of extortion, drugs and arms offences.

A vicious gangland feud that claimed at least 28 lives in Melbourne ended more than a decade ago, but detectives say that underworld tensions still fester in Australia’s second biggest city.

Two female suicide bombers have attacked a mosque in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 22 worshippers, the army says.

The first bomber struck inside the mosque, while the second blew herself up outside as survivors tried to flee. Eighteen other people were wounded in the attack, the army added.

Maiduguri is the birthplace of Islamist group Boko Haram’s insurgency which has killed 20,000 people since 2009. “We were just a few metres away from the mosque when a loud bang erupted and all we could see was dark smoke and bodies littered around,” another witness told Associated Press news agency.

The attack took place a few minutes after worshippers started an early morning prayer, the chief imam of Umarari mosque on the outskirts of the city. “My hearing was affected by the blast. I can’t hear well at the moment,” he added.

A statement from Nigeria’s army says all the wounded have been taken to a hospital in a nearby town.

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US student Otto Warmbier has been given 15 years hard labour in North Korea for crimes against the state.

Warmbier, 21, was arrested for trying to steal a propaganda sign from a hotel while visiting North Korea in January.

He later appeared on state TV apparently confessing and saying a church group had asked him to bring back a “trophy” from his trip. North Korea sometimes uses the detention of foreigners as a means of exerting pressure on its adversaries.

The 15-year sentence is high compared to those given to foreigners in the past. This could be due to the particularly high tensions at the moment between North Korea and the US, he says. North Korean state news agency KCNA said Warmbier was convicted under an article of the criminal code relating to subversion. The verdict was handed down by the Supreme Court. Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, was arrested on 2 January as he was trying to leave North Korea. He was accused of committing “hostile acts”.

KCNA said at the time he had gone to North Korea “to destroy the country’s unity” and that he had been “manipulated” by the US government.

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A terrorism suspect shot dead in a raid in a Brussels suburb on Tuesday has been identified as Algerian national Mohamed Belkaid, officials say.

He was killed by snipers while trying to fire at police from an apartment window in the suburb of Forest.Several officers were wounded in the raid. Police are still hunting two suspects who were in the apartment.

The raid was linked to an investigation into the jihadist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people last November.The so-called Islamic State (IS) militant group said it carried out the attacks.

According to the prosecutors’ spokesman, an IS flag was recovered from the apartment raided on Tuesday, along with Salafist (ultra-conservative Islamic) literature and Kalashnikov ammunition.The spokesman told reporters that Belkaid was born in 1980 and had been living in Belgium illegally. He was not known to the authorities except for one case of robbery.Police went to search an apartment in Forest on Tuesday afternoon.

As they entered the premises, they were fired upon by at least two occupants, the spokesman said.While Belkaid was shot dead that evening, two suspects who were with him managed to escape and are now the subject of a police manhunt.The spokesman said further searches were carried out near the apartment, and more ammunition was recovered.He also mentioned that police were trying to establish whether two people they had taken into custody were linked to the earlier events in Forest.

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Belgian security forces are hunting for at least two men after shots were fired at police during a counter-terrorism raid in the capital, Brussels.

Three officers were reportedly hurt, one of them seriously. Streets in the suburb of Forest have been sealed off . The raid is linked to the Paris attacks which killed 130 people last November. Islamic State (IS) militants have claimed responsibility for the attacks.

After Tuesday’s incident, police said they were pursuing at least two suspects who had escaped over rooftops. Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor, told AFP news agency that “police were fired at” during the raid on Tuesday afternoon. He added that the raid was “linked to the Paris attacks investigation”.

A major police operation is now under way, with a helicopter flying overhead. The whole area is flooded with police, with every access road being blocked. The operation appears to be focusing on Rue de la Station road. Two local schools with about 100 children were still in lockdown.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that French police officers were also taking part in the Brussels raid. Since the 13 November attacks, officials have identified most of the people they believe to have carried out the assaults.

Most of the suspects have either died during the attacks or been killed in later police raids. But two suspects – Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini – are still on the run.
However, French police sources said that Abdeslam was not the target of Tuesday’s raid.

In addition, 11 people have been arrested and charged in Belgium in connection with the killings. Another eight are still in detention. Parts of Brussels were sealed off for days after the Paris massacre amid fears of a major incident there as a number of suspected attackers lived in the Belgian capital.