[02:12.22]The president of Chad Idriss Deby says his troops in northern Mali have killed one of the senior commanders of al-Qaeda in North Africa, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.
[02:22.56]It was reported on Thursday that Abou Zeid had been killed but this hadn’t been independently confirmed.
[02:27.89]Richard Hamilton reports.
[02:29.41]President Deby said that Abou Zeid was killed in fighting on the 22nd of February in the Ifoghas Mountains north of Kidal near the Algerian border.
[02:39.42]However other reports suggested he may have been killed in an aerial bombardment by the French military and that Chadian forces recovered the corpses later.
[02:48.40]Algerian security services are said to be taking DNA samples at the request of the French from two of Abou Zeid’s relatives who are in jail in Algeria.
[02:57.95]World News from the BBC
[03:00.09]A Russian multimillionaire who is wanted on charges of fraud by the authorities in Moscow has been granted asylum in Britain.
[03:07.89]Andrei Borodin is accused of carrying out the fraud while he was head of the Bank of Moscow.
[03:12.61]He says the charges are politically motivated and accuses the former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev of being behind the move.
[03:19.97]The Russian authorities have criticized the British decision.
[03:23.37]The Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has appealed his fellow countrymen to vote peacefully in Monday’s general elections.