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Nigeria has filed charges against the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, accusing it of carrying out improper trials for an anti-meningitis drug in 1996.

Families were urged to take their sick children to Kano's infectious diseases hospital to receive treatment.

This is where Pfizer was testing a new antibiotic, Trovan, which was given to some of the sick children.

About 200 children died and more developed deformities.

The Nigerian government says these were caused by Trovan and says Pfizer did not get authorisation before giving out the drug. It wants $7bn in compensation.

Pfizer denied this, says the trials were carried out according to local and international law and that Trovan helped save lives during the meningitis outbreak.

Trovan has since been licensed for use by adults in the US but not Nigeria.

Sudan is secret partner of U.S.

Pfizer Faces Criminal Charges in Nigeria

The move represents a rare -- perhaps unprecedented -- instance in which the developing world's anger at multinational drug companies has boiled over into criminal charges. It also represents the latest in a string of public-relations blows stemming from the decade-old clinical trial, in which Pfizer says it acted ethically.

The government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group an untested antibiotic called Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.

The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use." Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.

Pfizer and its doctors "agreed to do an illegal act," the criminal charges state, and behaved "in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life."

US Ally Pakistani UN peacekeeping troops have traded in gold and sold weapons to Congolese militia groups they were meant to disarm, BBC has learned

These events took place in and around the mining town of Mongbwalu, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Pakistani battalion of the UN peacekeeping mission deployed there two years ago and helped bring peace to an area that had previously seen bitter fighting between the Lendu and Hema ethnic groups.

Locals welcomed them, but the lure of the rich alluvial gold mines proved too much to resist for some, recalls the head of the miners' association, Liki Likambo.

"I saw a UN Pakistani soldier who came to buy gold from one of the gold negotiators here in Mongbwalu. I was there in the shop. I saw it with my own eyes."

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Nigerian oil bombings cut 150,000 bpd output

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which has now shut down more than a quarter of Nigerian oil output, said in an e-mail it bombed the pipelines to embarrass President Olusegun Obasanjo in his last days in office. The MEND vowed to carry out more attacks in the world's eighth-largest crude exporter, where about 700,000 bpd were already being lost before the latest attacks. Raids on oil facilities and abductions have become frequent in the delta. Three South Koreans and eight Filipinos were freed on Tuesday after five days, a diplomat and security sources said, although another nine foreigners remain in captivity.
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The MEND, which demands local control of oil wealth in the impoverished delta, carried out a string of attacks in Feb. 2006 that reduced Nigerian output by 600,000 bpd. It threatened to blow up more pipelines between now and May 29, when Obasanjo is due to hand over to president-elect Umaru Yar'Adua.

Biden Calls for Military Force in Darfur

In advocating use of military force, Biden said senior U.S. military officials in Europe told him that 2,500 U.S. troops could ''radically change the situation on the ground now.''