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BBC news 2012-03-18

BBC News with Marion Marshall

Mauritanian and Libyan government officials say that Colonel Gaddafi's former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi has been captured. The Mauritanian authorities say he was detained at the airport in the capital Nouakchott after flying in from Morocco using a fake passport. Wyre Davies reports from Tripoli.

Abdullah Senussi was the most senior member of Colonel Gaddafi's government still on the run. He was also the most feared. As head of the state intelligence service, Abdullah Senussi was one of Muammar Gaddafi's closest and most loyal confidants. The 63-year-old has been accused of numerous human rights abuses and is wanted by the International Criminal Court. According to Libyan dissidents, Senussi would personally beat and abuse Colonel Gaddafi's opponents.

Egypt's Coptic Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria has died. Pope Shenouda was in his late 80s and had been in poor health for several years. He'd been the leader of the Middle East's largest Christian minority since 1971, but sometimes had a stormy relationship with the political elite, as Jon Leyne in Cairo reports.

In 1981, he fell out with President Sadat and was sent into internal exile for four years before he was allowed back into public life by President Mubarak. Under his leadership, Egypt's Coptic Christians were seen as giving tacit support to the regime of Hosni Mubarak in return for a degree of protection from Islamist extremists. Whoever succeeds him now faces the task of reassuring the Coptic Christian community as the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood look on the verge of sharing power in Egypt for the first time.

Several hundred activists have demonstrated in the Moroccan capital Rabat against the law on sexual violence, which allows a rapist to marry his victim as a way of avoiding prosecution. It follows the news spread by the Internet of the suicide a week ago of a 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, near Tangier in northern Morocco. Her parents say their daughter was pressured by a court into marrying her rapist. She took her own life by swallowing rat poison when she was subsequently abused by her attacker and his family. Morocco updated its legal code eight years ago, but activists say there's still much more to do.

A militant Shia group in Iraq says it's released a former American soldier it kidnapped last year. The group, which is loyal to the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, produced the man in US military uniform at a news conference in Baghdad. Rami Ruhayem reports from the Iraqi capital.

It would have been hard to believe were it not for the tall, dark-skinned man standing next to the Promised Day Brigade spokeswoman. As soon as she finished their announcement, the man stepped forward and explained in an American accent that he'd been deployed to Iraq in 2003, spent 15 months as a soldier and then moved to a civilian role. He said he was abducted on 18 June last year, and it was thought he'd be released for humanitarian reasons.

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The Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk has died in Germany at the age of 91. He was convicted last year of being an accessory to the murder of 28,000 people in the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II. Although sentenced to five years in prison, he was released on grounds of his age and died in an old people's home in Bavaria. Born in Ukraine, he settled in the United States after the war and was deported to Germany in 2009.

The Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has addressed parliament at the start of the new legislative period, which he described as a landmark in the country's history. It's the longest time Pakistan has had both a democratically elected president and a continuous government since independence in 1947. Mr Zardari told parliament that this showed everybody that democracy there was working.

"The world can see the march of democracy goes on. Our institutions are working. Together we are creating history. While a lot more needs to be done, a strong beginning has been made. We Pakistanis can be proud of our young democracy."

An English FA Cup football match has been abandoned after one of the players collapsed on the pitch. The Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba fell to the ground during the quarter-final tie at Tottenham Hotspur. Tim Franks has the details.

Fabrice Muamba collapsed five minutes before the end of the first half. The ball was nowhere near him. Players from both teams who were close to him waved frantically at their medical staff who raced onto the pitch. The TV cameras quickly pulled away as the medics pumped his chest for several minutes. Other players stood or squatted in tears, their hands clasped. Among the spectators, the sound went from raucous to near silent. The referee Howard Webb, his face gaunt, spoke to both managers and called the players off the pitch. A few minutes later, the game was abandoned.

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