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 was perpetrated in summer 2007 with the alleged involvement of the same policemen and financier as in the kidnapping.
The larger tax fraud was uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer working for the UK hedge fund Hermitage Capital who presented evidence against the police allegedly involved. He was later arrested on tax evasion charges and held in custody for a year awaiting trial before dying of medical complications that were left untreated.
Mr Magnitsky has since become a symbol of the struggle against corrupt forces in Russia. This week, the Foreign Office cited his case in a report into "human rights violations" in Russia.

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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 has come in several batches.

In December, police began to search for a missing prostitute, Shannan Gilbert, 24. She had fled a client's beachside house early one morning in May, screaming for help then disappearing into the dunes. They never found her. The client was cleared from being a suspect after police searched his home and vehicle.

While looking for Gilbert, they found four bodies hidden in and around Gilgo Beach. All were wrapped in hessian sacks and appeared to have been deposited during the past three years. None were Gilbert.

More than three months later and with no one caught for the crimes, police have made yet more grim findings. At the end of last month and about a mile from the original dumping ground, a policeman passing Oak Beach in his patrol car noticed an object. It turned out to be yet another body of a young woman.

Immediately a mini-army of police and firefighters, helicopters and dog handling teams, sealed off the huge area with police tape, scouring the tick-infested scrub. They later found three more bodies.

The authorities are working 12-hour days, searching the area again and again.

None of the new bodies has yet been officially identified, but police are working on the assumption that they fit the pattern of the earlier victims.

Investigators are appealing for information from people involved in the local sex trade. "They certainly must have some information. Anything that they may deem to be significant or even insiginificant may be significant to us," said Thomas Spota, the Suffolk County district attorney.

Forensic experts are trying to identify the latest remains and see if they include Gilbert. Her disappearance might harbour key clues. She was last seen running from a client's house and shouting: "They're trying to kill me."

She banged on a neighbour's door but ran off before the police were called. Police spoke to her later on her mobile phone but she was disorientated and told them she was on a different beach. She was never heard of or seen again.

The victims identified so far are Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25; Melissa Barthelmy, 24; Megan Waterman, 22; and Amber Lynn Costello, 27.

Police insist that they have devoted huge resources and they continue to appeal to the public not to be prejudiced by the fact that at least some of the victims so far have been sex workers.

"What activities these victims may have engaged in prior to their murder does not matter. They were young women whose lives were cut tragically short," said Richard Dormer, Suffolk County's police commissioner.

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