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