Sixteen other members of his gang have been convicted of offences that include conspiracy to kidnap and blackmail, and conspiracy to supply heroin.On Green Lanes life has greatly improved since Baybasin and his thugs were locked up. One man said: “When I first arrived in this area shopkeepers told me that they used to be taxed, and about finding blood on the pavements – it sounded like something out of the wild west. During that trial a witness said Baybasin and his brother were responsible for 90 per cent of the heroin trade in Britain.Baybasin will be sentenced in both cases at the end of next month. Two weeks earlier he was found guilty of drug charges involving 5.5lb of heroin. “You could hear within the room people getting kicked and punched As well as extortion they used to tax other criminals. For example, people who did human trafficking were told to pay £1,000 levy a person.Police also recorded discussions about plans for petrol-bomb attacks on shops that would not pay for protection.But Apo’s reign of terror came to an end last Friday when at Woolwich Crown Court he pleaded guilty to extortion.

The room contained a settee, a small table, television and computer.”Baybasin’s would turn up two or three times a week to run the business,” said Det Chief Insp Plummer. In November 2002 a battle broke out between about 40 men armed with guns, knives and baseball bats outside a cafe, the Dostlar Social Club, in Green Lanes, north-east London. Twenty men were injured and an innocent man, Alisan Dogan, a 43-year-old Kurdish cleaner, was fatally stabbed.By now the elite National Crime Squad had Baybasin in its sights and as part of Operation Marmot managed to fit a hidden camera in the network’s headquarters in 2003.The premises used by Baybasin and his cronies was a dingy room that was accessed via a reinforced glass door by the side of a food shop on Green Lanes. With his imprisonment it was Abdullah Baybasin’s turn at the helm.The new leader was wheelchair-bound after suffering a spinal injury reportedly from a ricocheting bullet during a shooting in the Netherlands. He is thought to have come to the UK in 1997 and applied for temporary leave to remain as a political refugee.

In the same year he bought a six-bedroomed house in Edgware, north London, for £375,000, which was paid for in cash. He is married to a woman who has UK citizenship, and the couple have a teenage son.Tensions between his followers and PKK supporters grew after “Apo” Baybasin decided to stop funding the separatists, according to police intelligence. Some of the huge profits being made by the Baybasin network was siphoned off by the family to buy properties and land in Turkey, and a hotel in Brighton, while the PKK continued to receive a share.In 2001 the eldest Baybasin, “the Emperor”, was convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnapping and drug smuggling and sentenced to 20 years – later increased to life – in jail in the Netherlands. The enterprise generated a fortune and Huseyin Baybasin earned the nickname of “the Emperor”. His international network smuggled hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of the drug into the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Germany each year. From the 1970s the family manufactured heroin in secret factories in the Lice area of Turkey.

In fact, it started life as a play about adultery in Murray-Smith’s native Melbourne; but the location has been shifted to Hampstead to suit UK audiences, and seems to have lost nothing in translation. For decades, the stock sneer at the English novel was that it was preoccupied with “adultery in Hampstead”. As P F Duggan, he wrote television drama about police inquiries and counter-intelligence. So he should prove ideal casting as a man who keeps his cards close to his chest.. “I’ve worked out he speaks seven languages, and if he has more than one passport, we are definitely in Le Carr?ountry…”Malahide was born Patrick Duggan and changed his name because there was already a Patrick Duggan in Equity. The audience must be left with the ultimate unknowability of what happened, and that’s why it’s such an intriguing play and, hopefully, such a resonant one.”The script will no doubt give a good work-out to Irons’s richly mournful and melancholic voice, and the impenetrability of Konrad should be right up Malahide’s brutal alley. Malahide is not averse to sharing some of his decisions about Konrad with us: that he has been hiding things all his life and that the only way he could have crossed Europe in wartime was to have been related to the security forces in some way.

“It’s wonderful to be in one place for four months,” he agrees “The past two years have been crazy. I find myself gradually getting back in touch with theatre, and it’s lovely.”"Theatre is where the actor is ultimately in charge,” says Blakemore “We rehearse collaboratively I give the actors unwanted notes. They question them ["As nicely as possible," Malahide chips in]. But when it gets under way and the critics are in, it’s the actor finally up there calling the shots And that’s what draws us back. It’s not only pleasure; it’s the responsibility of making sure the audience are not shuffling about.”This play sets up a denouement and then deliberately disappoints us. But we are nostalgic for it.”Was Irons nostalgic, I ask, for a return to the routine of theatre? There are so many Irons in the fire of cinema these days that a quiet poke among the embers of theatre must make a nice change.

Raymond van Barneveld yesterday stunned the darts fraternity by crossing the rarely charted divide between the British Darts Organisation and the Professional Darts Corporation. See You Sometime upset a clutch of Gold Cup contenders, headed by Royal Auclair, to notch his first victory in 10 starts as the outsider of five and will be back on Saturday for the three-mile handicap. “He came out of that last run really well,” said trainer Seamus Mullins, “and has been bouncing around the yard thinking he is the bee’s knees.”Among the 11-year-old’s opponents will be Royal Auclair’s Paul Nicholls stablemate Silver Birch, the Grand National third favourite, who will be running over fences for the first time this season and the last time before Aintree.Silver Birch is scheduled to be ridden by Paddy Brennan; at Haydock, Graham Lee has landed the plum ride on another of Nicholls’ National contenders, L’Aventure.Chris McGrathNap: Cruise Director(Taunton 3.40)NB: Definite Approach(Taunton 4.10). Last year’s winner, Inglis Drever, won the Kingwell Hurdle on the way.Royal Shakespeare’s chief rivals on Saturday will be last year’s Triumph Hurdle winner Penzance, who has found the transition to senior company difficult so far, and the very good youngster Natal, who has the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, on the first day of the Cheltenham Festival, as his target.The horse who pooped the party at Wincanton two weeks ago is to return to the scene of his social gaffe. He was off his food a little after Sandown but he worked well on Tuesday and is back in good shape.”The gelding has won twice at Grade 2 level and missed out on a top-level victory by a whisker as a novice, when he ran Brave Inca to a short-head at Punchestown.

He has earned £170,000 but as far as Gollings is concerned points mean prize money, for top spot on the Order of Merit is worth £250,000. Last time out he won at Sandown despite tacky conditions and even though, as far as the wider public are concerned, he has had a charisma bypass, he is a thoroughly admirable character. “He was not really at the top of his game then,” said Gollings, “and without disrespecting the second horse [the handicapper Alph] we should have beaten him a lot further.”He was never travelling like he can but he has run with great credit on unsuitable ground this season, especially at Haydock [fourth to Al Eile on heavy] Looking back, I thought that was a fantastic performance. And there are more showers forecast, so its all in the lap of the gods. But unless the meeting is off, he will run.”Royal Shakespeare’s last visit to the sharp, flat Somerset track, in November, brought a victory; the one before that, in last year’s Kingwell, a third place.

While the Bric economies comprise only 4 per cent of group volumes, their net sales (after deducting excise duties) shot up more than 40 per cent. Michael Bleakley, at CSFB, said: “These results show that Diageo has the flexibility to meet its targets – ‘whatever the weather’.”The company has shifted marketing spending from Europe, where net sales fell 1 per cent, to new markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (Bric). Diageo said the hurricanes cost it £4m to £5m, while higher oil prices landed it with a £10m bill. The group, whose brands include Guinness, Johnnie Walker whisky, Gordon’s gin and Smirnoff vodka, reported underlying sales up 5 per cent and operating profits up 7 per cent to £1.26bn in the first half.
The chief executive, Paul Walsh, predicted the group would meet its full-year target for 7 per cent operating profit growth. The drinks giant Diageo shrugged off weakness in Europe and the impact from soaring oil prices and hurricanes to deliver a 7 per cent rise in interim profits yesterday. The performance reassured investors after the company warned in November that first-half sales and profits growth could be blown off course by the US hurricanes.

“The level of complaints from mis-selling of endowment and investment products has considerably exceeded expectations and we have not escaped this trend,” it said.Mr Crawshaw said the bank was likely to continue acquiring mortgage customers as opportunities came available over the coming year, but said it was unlikely to get involved in a major acquisition.Shares in Bradford & Bingley gained 3 per cent in early trading yesterday, before closing down 1.5p at 448.75p, giving the group a market value of £2.85bn.. He said he expected the UK lending market to grow about 5 per cent in 2006 to push through £300bn.The bank said it planned to increase its full-year dividend by 7 per cent, compared with a rise of just 4 per cent last year, and would also manage to raise its dividend cover to almost two times the group’s underlying earnings.Claims for mis-selling of financial products, such as endowment mortgages and precipice bonds, continued to dog the company’s bottom line, forcing the group to increase its reserves for compensation for the year to £38.7m. However, Mr Crawshaw said he believed arrears levels in this market were also near their peak.”Back-to-back house price scare stories have lost their credibility,” he said. “The housing market is in good shape.”James Leal, an analyst at Teather & Greenwood, said he agreed that the buy-to-let market looked in good shape, adding that his sell recommendation on Bradford &Bingley stock was only on the back of his belief that the company is overvalued.Reporting its preliminary results for 2005, the bank unveiled an 11 per cent increase in underlying pre-tax profits to £310.1m – ahead of the market consensus of about £305m.Mr Crawshaw said the strong results were driven by a successful cut in costs across the business, as well as a growing momentum in the property market in the second half of 2005. Arrears in the regular residential lending market increased more than 50 per cent over the year, to almost 1.2 per cent. “Although the fact that arrears have doubled looks quite exciting, these are still very smallnumbers,” he said.

But the plans have drawn a furious reaction from religious leaders and been condemned as “suicidal” by other gay activists .Earlier this week Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin warned that Russia’s Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead. “If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike … [The protests] might be even more intense than protests abroad against those controversial cartoons.”The cleric said the Koran taught that homosexuals should be killed because their lifestyle spells the extinction of the human race and said that gays had no human rights.The Russian Orthodox Church has called it “the propaganda of sin”. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s administration said yesterday it would not even consider an application for a parade, prompting Russia’s gay community to threaten legal action in the European Court of Human Rights.
Gay and lesbian activists have been campaigning for permission to stage the country’s first gay pride event on Saturday 27 May.The date marks the 13th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia in 1993.

“The next government will have the task of filling the gap.”. Plans to stage Russia’s first gay pride parade have been vetoed by Moscow’s city government on the grounds that the idea has caused “outrage” in society. “It is clear at the moment there are not enough resources in the pipeline,” he said. In its 2006 budget, the ministry got a grand total of €60m to take care of all the country’s ancient sites – to be spread over 15 years.The sum is inadequate: officials estimate that a full restoration of the Palatine area alone would cost €130m over 10 years.Culture minister Rocco Buttiglione washed his hands of the problem.

Kingfisher, the do-it-yourself giant under pressure in the UK, admitted profit margins at its struggling B&Q chain would slump further this year as it battled intense competition. The network overlaps almost entirely with National Grid’s electricity distribution company in Rhode Island which supplies 477,000 customers.This latest deal is the fourth that National Grid has pulled off in the US – all on the north-east seaboard. A National Grid spokesman said there would be savings to be made from reducing the number of call centres and distribution sites on Rhode Island. But he said that all 600 staff employed by the Southern Union subsidiary would be offered jobs by National Grid and any redundancies would be achieved through natural wastage.The Rhode Island company serves 245,000 customers through 3,000 miles of gas mains. The company is buying Southern Union’s Rhode Island gas distribution business for £285m in cash and taking on a further £44m of debt. The deal comes less than a fortnight after National Grid’s chief executive-designate, Steve Holliday, served notice that it planned further US expansion and brings the amount that National Grid has invested in the US over the past five years to more than $15bn (£8.6bn). The US market accounts for about 40 per cent of the group’s operations.
The Rhode Island business overlaps with National Grid’s existing electricity distribution network in the area, meaning that there will be scope for substantial savings.

National Grid, the owner of the UK’s gas and electricity transmission networks, further strengthened its presence in the American market yesterday with the £329m acquisition of a gas distributor based in the north-east of the US. Mr Karabelas flew to Switzerland last Friday accompanied by his new chief executive, Frank Condella. Mr Karabelas was quietly confident HBM would back the board, saying: “It was a very successful meeting.” NAV has also been to Switzerland to try to win HBM’s support.Mr Karabelas admitted: “Clearly there is disappointment about what’s happened to the share price That’s something I’m very sympathetic to.”. It is the single largest shareholder in SkyePharma, with a 9.3 per cent stake.

Police have so far said it was unclear whether the gunman was in any way connected with the burglary at the house in Lenton Boulevard. Miss Bown was nearing the end of a two-year probationary period with Nottinghamshire Police and had only recently transferred to the city centre beat. He has piercings in both ears in which he sometimes wears ear studs, and he has one or more gold teeth. Thomas was born in Trinidad and speaks with a mild Caribbean accent. This morning, Miss Bown was awake in her bed at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, where she is in a stable condition after undergoing a second emergency operation yesterday She had the operation after a “setback” in her condition. He is described as a dark-skinned black male, 5ft 9in and of slim build He is thought to have short, cropped black hair He has slight facial growth and brown eyes, the force said.

“If you see this man or know where he is now, you should not approach him but dial 999 immediately.” Nottinghamshire Police have also issued a photograph of Thomas. Miss Bown, a 23-year-old probationary officer, was blasted in the stomach shortly before midnight on Monday while investigating a burglary in the Lenton area of Nottingham. Detective Chief Inspector Dave Giles said: “I’m appealing for any information which could help us trace this man as a matter of urgency. The Metropolitan Police and Nottinghamshire Police refused to immediately confirm whether the arrest was linked to the Pc Bown inquiry.

Police boarded a plane at Heathrow airport today and arrested a man. The arrest was made just hours after detectives named a suspect they want to trace in connection with the shooting of policewoman Rachael Bown in Nottingham.
It was unclear whether the arrested man was Trevon Kyron Thomas, 24, from the Bilborough area of Nottingham, who is wanted over the shooting The plane was stationary when officers boarded it at 11am. He could have been the first winner of the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, awarded for “acts of the greatest heroism or the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger”.But the committee, chaired by Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, ruled that the officer’s actions, spontaneous rather than calculated, did not meet the “extremely high” standards required.. Mr Brown also announces the date of his next (final?) Budget, 22 March.. Downing Street has said Tony Blair will not try to overturn the decision to deny a posthumous George Cross to a police officer killed by a terror suspect.

But there was nothing lacking in his playing, in which his soaring improvisations were the perfect foil to Williams’s more formal technique.
Both played solo numbers, Etheridge dipping into the standards with “God Bless the Child” and Sonny Rollins’s “Doxy” and Williams demonstrating his mastery of the Latin American classical canon. On the strength of this performance Orton’s light hasn’t faded just yet.Touring until 28 February; www.bethorton.mu. The band (rhythm guitar, bass, drums, and piano) hails from Chicago – aside from the piano player who’s a Norfolk boy. They remain professional shadows throughout.”Feral” is her Joni Mitchell moment, and once again touches on the recurring theme of soured relationships, alluding to the strength of feral children who know that there are “no words for the infinity of ghosts”.

Like so much of the new material, it sounds fully formed in a live setting, and like her voice, has a richer tone. Even when she manages to rock out with the fervour of a less-contrived Alanis Morissette on “Shopping Trolley” it doesn’t sound forced.The best moments are saved until last when Orton dedicates a beautifully sparse version of “Pieces of Sky” to a mysterious local muse, and a perfectly weighted encore performance of “She Cries Your Name” and the delicately fractured “Feel to Believe”. But there’s also veiled lightness to her demeanour; a sense of not taking herself too seriously, and of being extremely grateful for the chance to air her new compositions. And the setlist is drawn extensively from her new material – her occasional forays into the back catalogue done largely solo with a single spotlight marking out her gangly frame.By the time she gets to “Heart Of Soul” she’s visibly relaxed and cranking up the passion, adding extra gravitas to the lyrics: “so tell me what Neil Young said, you pick a flower and it’s dead”. It certainly makes the rolling freight train rhythm of “Rectify” and the achingly beautiful solo rendition of the eternally crepuscular “Stolen Car” that much more endearing.Long legs set slightly apart, shoulders slightly hunched under a tight denim shirt, it’s hard not to agree with the Mercury Music panel when they dubbed her “queen of the heartbreak vocal” after her 1996 debut Trailer Park. In a typically British way you find yourself willing her along, hoping that she will tune the guitar in time, that her silly jokes will be funny, and that her apologies will be appreciated But her in-between banter is engagingly refreshing.

She doesn’t do super-gloss production and her shows are all the better for it. Expectations are higher, there’s a fear of stagnation, and equally of alienating the fans she’s managed to accumulate. It’s been four years since her last album, Daybreaker, and her first UK tour since 2004, so when she tells the audience that she’s glad they like her new songs, and that it always takes a while to get used to a new pair of shoes, she genuinely means it.Orton is one of those performers who you can see unravel in front of your very eyes. If you wanted a folk twang to your nocturnal beats, Orton was your woman. So how did she make the transition from dance beats to North American-style folk? Well, the answer lies in her initial inspirations.

Imagine what we could discover with two years of research.”Among the companies named is the British firm SR Pharma, which it says holds patents for a mycobacterium collected in Uganda during the 1970s and used to develop a treatment for chronic viral infections, including HIV.SR Pharma’s final director Melvyn Davies confirmed his company had neither offered the product or financial compensation to Uganda. “We have identified a number of cases that require a lot of explanation. The problem is that we have a world [where companies] are used to taking whatever they want from wherever and thinking they are doing it for the good of mankind.”Mariam Mayet, of the South Africa-based African Centre for Biodiversity, co-authors of the report, said: “There is a total disregard and disrespect for Africa’s resources Our findings were made after just one month of research. White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected the call to shut the camp, saying the military treats all detainees humanely and “these are dangerous terrorists that we’re talking about.”.

Dozens of Western multinationals have made millions of pounds in profits from exploiting African bio-resources taken from some of the poorest nations on earth, with not a penny offered in return. Pharmaceutical firms are accused of breaching the United Nations convention on biodiversity, which states that nations have sovereignty over their own natural resources, by scouring continents for samples of unique materials, from plants to bacteria.
A ground-breaking report identifies numerous materials, taken from Africa to Western laboratories, which have developed and patented products worth hundreds of millions of pounds – from a trailing plant beloved of gardeners across Europe to a natural cure for impotence and a microbe used in fading designer jeans.In some cases companies accept that their product is based on a traditional source and yet there is no evidence the companies have compensated countries from which they took them.”It’s a new form of colonial pillaging,” said Beth Burrows, of the US-based Edmonds Institute, the environmental group that published the report. Somalia is one of the poorest African nations and campaigners are deeply concerned that the drought in the south of the country, which has already struck neighbouring Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Tanzania and Burundi, will hit the nation, disrupted by wars, particularly hard.The price of containers used to transport water has rocketed to more than a day’s wages for most Somalis, said Brendan Cox, an Oxfam spokesman. A water canister that used to cost at least 1p now costs 70p in a region where residents live on pennies a day.The latest UN report on Somalia said 1.7 million people – 710,000 of them experiencing acute food shortages – needed food assistance of some kind in addition to the 410,000 refugees who depend on food aid.. The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the United States should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay for terror suspects as soon as possible, backing a key conclusion of a UN-appointed independent panel.

Increasingly large numbers of people are dying from dehydration on 40-mile treks to fetch water in scorching temperatures of up to 40C.
“The situation will get worse unless swift action is taken,” said Mohamed Elmi, Oxfam’s regional programme manager. The impoverished people of Somalia are being forced to surviv e on three containers of water a day for drinking, cooking and washing, Oxfam has said. The military claims it was acting on credible evidence of a terrorist threat, but most observers read the incident as a none-too-subtle attempt to intimidate judges.Although Mr Besigye is Museveni’s most credible opponent to date, it is highly unlikely that he will win. Many expect Mr Museveni’s people to ensure a victory at any cost and fear the weeks and months that will follow the poll.”Museveni will cheat the election,” said Justin as he leaned on his motorbike next to one of Kampala’s potholed roads “He cheated last time Besigye is my man, but he cannot win.”. “Why don’t they want to give the state a chance to prove its cases? Why are they always looking as if they are always siding with the offenders?” he asked of Mr Besigye’s case.The general’s verbal assault follows a physical assault on the judiciary in November. A 30-strong branch of the security forces, popularly known as the Black Mamba Urban Hit Squad, wearing tight black T-shirts and bandanas, raced into the grounds of the High Court carrying an assortment of automatic weapons.

“All the past governments collapsed because they failed to control the army,” he told a rally in Entebbe, on the shores of Lake Victoria, last month. “We have managed to tame it.” A fortnight ago a senior general criticised the judiciary on a live radio broadcast. The army is ever-present, and not just in the north where for 20 years it has failed to defeat the rebel Lords Resistance Army in a war that has the dubious distinction of being Africa’s longest-running conflict.Mr Museveni likes to remind voters that only he can control the army. Three weeks later he was arrested and charged with treason and rape His supporters rioted in the streets of Kampala. The arrest did not go down well with Western governments who provide half Uganda’s budget and who have long f?d Mr Museveni as one of the new breed of democratic African leaders In response to the arrest Britain and others cut aid.

Smiths definitely looks like a good fit for Honeywell.”Another corporate activity favourite, the brewer Scottish & Newcastle, fell out of favour with traders as Nils Andersen, the chief executive of its Danish rival Carlsberg, said his company has no plans to merge with S&N. The shares declined 5.5p to close at 519p but some traders remain hopeful that S&N is still a target. One said: “He said that Carlsberg won’t merge with S&N, but that doesn’t mean it won’t bid for it. The Russian business is booming and other brewers, maybe Anheuser Busch or even SABMiller, could bid for S&N.”In the broader market, weakness in oils and mining issues dragged the FTSE 100 12.1 lower to close at 6,086.6. BP’s uninspiring first-quarter performance led to a bout of profit-taking, with the shares closing 10p worse at 701.5p.

In the miners, Xstrata was 36p cheaper at 2,092p, while Anglo American lost 37p to close at 2,424p.Elsewhere in the FTSE 100, broadcasters were in focus with talk that the buyout giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is poised to bid for ITV, less than a month after another private-equity consortium, led by Apax Partners and including Goldman Sachs, abandoned a bid for the group. BSkyB was also well bid, with traders focusing on the rights to football’s Premier League. Final bids for broadcast rights are due tomorrow, with BSkyB losing its monopoly on live football rights. ITV edged 1.5p firmer to 116p, while BSkyB added 12p to close at 527p, among the best performers in the FTSE 100.Yet again there was corporate activity chat in the housebuilding sector, with Redrow thought to be on the verge of receiving a 700p-per-share bid. Most of the talk in the sector has surrounded Redrow and Bovis Homes, with traders saying the two groups made the best fit in the sector.