Armoured & Luxury
Chauffeur Driven Cars

Egypt has deployed a robot submarine to search for the flight data recorders of the missing EgyptAir plane.

“We are moving hard to retrieve the two boxes,” President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi said in his first public comments on the crash. The Airbus A320 was en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard when it vanished from radar early on Thursday.

Mr Sisi said there was “no particular theory we can affirm right now” for what caused flight MS804 to crash. Investigators say smoke was detected in various parts of the cabin three minutes before it disappeared.

Egypt’s civil aviation minister has said the possibility of a terror attack was stronger than technical failure, but Mr Sisi said establishing the cause could take a long time, adding “all scenarios are possible”.

The Egyptian military released images on Saturday of life vests, personal items and debris showing the EgyptAir logo which were found during the search in the Mediterranean Sea. The unnamed robot submarine is normally used to service offshore oil rigs, according to a source from the country’s oil ministry quoted by Reuters news agency.

The search has also reportedly found body parts and luggage. The main body of the plane and the two “black boxes” which record flight data and cockpit transmissions have not yet been located.

The Aviation Herald said that smoke detectors had gone off in the toilet and the aircraft’s electronics before the signal was lost. It said it had received flight data filed through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) from three independent channels. It said the system showed that at 02:26 local time on Thursday (00:26 GMT) smoke was detected in the jet’s toilet. A minute later – at 00:27 GMT – there was an avionics alert indicating smoke in the bay below the cockpit that contains aircraft electronics and computers.

Read More

A series of car and suicide bombings has hit two government strongholds on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

State media said at least 78 people were killed, while a monitoring group put the death toll at more than 120.

Four bombings targeted bus stations in the port city of Tartous and in Jableh, a town to the north, which have until now escaped the worse of the civil war. A news agency linked to so-called Islamic State (IS) said the jihadist group was behind the attacks.

Amaq cited an IS source as saying militants had targeted “gatherings of Alawites”, a reference to the heterodox Shia sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

Russia – a key backer of Mr Assad – has a naval base in Tartous and an airbase near Jableh, from where it has conducted air strikes on IS targets across Syria. The state news agency, Sana, cited a police source as saying that 45 people were killed and many others, most of them women and children, were injured in Jableh. It reported that two bombs exploded at the main entrance of the town’s bus station. A suicide bomber also blew himself up at the entrance of the emergency department at Jableh National Hospital, it added. The fourth blast reportedly occurred near the offices of Jableh’s electricity directorate, on the outskirts of the Amara residential district.

In Tartous, more than 33 people were killed and 47 injured, Sana said. A car bomb was detonated at the main gate to the city’s bus station, while a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest inside the facility, it added.

Another bomber blew himself up in a residential area in the west of the city, according to Sana.

Read More

A pensioner who died in 2014 could have been behind a spate of sadistic killings in the 1970s and 1990s, German investigators say.

They are examining Manfred Seel’s links with the murders of five women and a teenage boy. Organs had been taken from all of the victims’ bodies.

The five women were all working as prostitutes when they died. Investigators say it is possible the killer had an accomplice and that there may have been other victims.

The man has been identified as a landscape architect from the town of Schwalbach near Frankfurt who was 67 when he died. Suspicions were raised after the pensioner’s death, when his daughter found a woman’s remains inside a barrel in a garage he had rented. They belonged to Britta Simone Diallo, who had been living in Frankfurt and working as a prostitute. Investigators say there is no doubt that he killed her.

Seel is suspected of carrying out the murders of Gudrun Ebel and Hatice Eruelkeroglu in 1971, Gisela Singh in 1991, Dominique Monrose in 1993 and Tristan Bruebach in 1998. Investigators suggested that the 20-year gap may have been a time when he was busy, for example with raising a family. The victims’ wounds matched injuries depicted in violent pornography found on Seel’s computer.

He also had more than 32,000 images involving cannibalism and glorifying violence.

The only male victim Manfred Seel is suspected of murdering is Tristan Bruebach, a 13-year-old boy whose throat was cut while he was walking home from school in 1998. The teenager’s mutilated body was found in a tunnel in Frankfurt.

The six murders all happened in and around Frankfurt. But detectives from the Hessen State Office of Criminal Investigations (LKA) say they are now examining hundreds of cold cases. Police are looking for clues that might link Seel to further killings. They are also looking for people he knew and came into contact with

A man who has admitted scaling Buckingham Palace’s wall is a convicted murderer, a court has heard.

Dennis Hennessy, 41, of Wembley, north-west London, pleaded guilty to one count of trespass on a protected site and one count of criminal damage. He admitted the charges at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where he was jailed for four months.

The court heard how he had been on licence after being convicted of the murder of a homeless man in 1992.

Hennessy cut his right hand as he climbed over the top of the wall, which is between 8ft to 10ft high, and set the alarm off. He had walked around the palace gardens for about 10 minutes before his arrest.

Hennessy told police he had “walked through the gardens admiring the view”.

Prosecutor Tom Nicholson told the court that he had repeatedly asked “is Ma’am in?” as he was detained. Chief magistrate, senior district judge Howard Riddle, sentenced him to four months for trespassing and two months, to run concurrently, for damaging the wires of the alarm system.

A man has been arrested after four women were stabbed in a car park at a supermarket in west London.

Police were called at about 10:30 BST to Sainsbury’s on The Avenue in Hampton.

London Ambulance Service said the women were treated at the scene for stab wounds to the chest, legs and back. One of the victims was taken to a major trauma centre by an air ambulance while three others were taken by road to a south London hospital as “priority”.