The US Justice Department on Wednesday asked a federal judge to review the rules for handling 113 appeal cases by `war on terror` detainees being held at the US naval base prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to court documents.

The `dark side` of US counter-terrorism took center stage Wednesday in the case of a mentally ill Pakistani woman accused of attacking US officers in Afghanistan.

A New York federal judge referred to allegations that the accused, Aafia Siddiqui, was abducted and tortured by US or allied forces prior to her extradition from Afghanistan in August.

Convicted double murderer Gregory Bryant-Bey, 53, was put to death Wednesday, corrections officials in Ohio said.

The condemned man died by lethal injection at 10:41 am (1641 GMT), prison officials in Lucasville, Ohio announced.

The Toledo Blade newspaper reported that Bryant-Bey died proclaiming his innocence, insisting in his final statement that he had been `framed.`

A US judge on Wednesday ordered further psychiatric evaluation for a Pakistani woman he says is mentally incompetent to stand trial on charges of attempted murder of US officers in Afghanistan.

Judge Richard Berman told the federal court in New York that Aafia Siddiqui, a US-educated neuroscientist extradited in August from Afghanistan, is `not currently competent to proceed.`

Tens of thousands of people took part Wednesday in the biggest demonstrations seen in Rwanda since the country`s 1994 genocide massacres, protesting against France`s charges against a top aide to President Paul Kagame.

A former United Nations official convicted by a US court of money-laundering in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has been transferred to his native Russia, the Russian foreign ministry said Wednesday.

An Albanian court on Wednesday sentenced a British man to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing children at an orphanage in the Balkan country.

David Brown, a 57-year-old charity worker, was found guilty of sexually abusing at least two children, aged nine and 10, in the orphanage located in the central town of Elbasan, judge Geri Hoxha said.

Tens of thousands poured onto the streets of Kigali Wednesday to condemn France in Rwanda`s biggest post-genocide protests as a top aide to President Paul Kagame was extradited from Germany to Paris.

Spain on Wednesday promised to help families of victims who disappeared during the 1936-39 civil war and the ensuing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco to track their remains.

Denmark`s supreme court Wednesday ruled illegal the detention without trial of one of two Tunisians held for allegedly plotting to kill a cartoonist who satirised the Prophet Mohammed.