London  - A London taxi driver was found guilty Friday of drugging and sexually assaulting 12 female passengers in the back of his car, for which he will be given a "substantial term of imprisonment," a court was told.

John Worboys, 51, gave the women champagne laced with sedatives after inviting them to celebrate an alleged large gambling win with him, Croyden Crown Court heard.

Dhaka  - At least four persons were killed and 20 injured in a devastating fire Friday at Basundhara City, Bangladesh's largest shopping mall, in Dhaka, officials said.

Firefighters recovered three more charred bodies from inside the debris on the upper floors of the 21-storey building, in which the top five floors were destroyed, Tejgaon zone police chief Mahbubur Rahman said.

Earlier, a firefighter of the Basundhara group was killed and 20 people sustained burn injuries.

Moscow - Russian police in Siberia stormed a bank and killed an armed man who had taken five hostages there Friday, a police spokesman said.

"The operation was successful. The hostages are safe and sound. The criminal is dead," the Interfax news agency quoted a police spokesman from the town of Leninsk-Kuznetski as saying.

Rio de Janeiro  - A man suspected of having raped a teenage girl caused a tragedy in Brazil, when he attacked his wife, abducted his 5-year-old daughter in a stolen airplane and crashed on the parking lot of a shopping mall.

The crash Thursday at the shopping mall in the city of Goiania, near Brasilia, initially put the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) on alert, thinking it was a terrorist attack similar to that perpetrated on September 11, 2001 in the United States.

The man and his child died in the crash of the single-engine plane.

London - Northern Ireland bid a moving farewell to the police officer shot dead by suspected terrorists in a church service attended Friday by leading representatives of Sinn Fein, the party once closely linked to paramilitary terrorism in the province.

Police constable Stephen Carroll, a Catholic, was the first police officer to be murdered in Northern Ireland since 1998. His death also marked the first loss of an officer belonging to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), formed in 2001.