Questions have been raised about the role played by a sawmill foreman convicted of Russia's largest tax fraud

Victor Markelov, 43, confessed in April 2009 to a vastly complex $230m theft of taxes paid to the Russian people and was jailed for five years with no fine in an apparent attempt to draw a veil over what was becoming an embarrassing episode for senior state officials implicated in the crime.According to claims filed with the Russian prosecutor's office, Mr Markelov may have been paid to take the fall. Two days after being arrested for the alleged kidnapping of a company director in late 2006 and attempting to extort $20m out of his boss, Mr Markelov was transferred ownership of a company with a book value of $1m.One month later and still in custody, he became owner of another company worth $1.1m. He was released six months after his arrest and just months before the alleged $230m tax fraud...

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New York police search for more bodies on Long Island beach

Police have returned to an overgrown stretch of land off Long Island a day after three more bodies were found, taking the number of victims of a suspected serial killer in the New York city area to eight.It is a huge crime scene – several square miles of windswept sand dunes and thick undergrowth – that has been scoured several times by police searchers, but more bodies keep turning up.All of the corpses identified so far are young, white women who worked as prostitutes, and police believe they are dealing with a serial killer, or killers.The victims found their clients on Craig's List or other similar websites and police believe some of them, perhaps all, were killed elsewhere and then dumped on Oak Island, a narrow barrier island an hour's drive from Manhattan.The grisly harvest of bodies...

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