Johannesburg - A fourth police official was arrested for charges related to drug trafficking, local media reported Tuesday.

Earlier, police said the head of an organized crime unit and two of his subordinates were arrested on charges of theft, fraud and racketeering.

"They would take some of the consignment [of seized drugs] from the scene of the crime and sell it to drug lords," SAPA news agency quoted a spokeswoman for crime intelligence, Senior Superintendent Tummi Golding, as saying.

London - A 17-year-old boy was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday on a murder charge in the slaying of a police officer earlier this month in County Armagh, a Police Service of Northern Ireland spokeswoman said.

The youth was charged late Monday in the killing of Constable Stephen Carroll. He faces additional charges of membership in the banned Continuity IRA, possession of a firearm with intent and collecting information likely to be of use to terrorists.

Kuala Lumpur - Malaysian police have detained four Taiwan men and seized more than 430 kilograms of drugs worth 61.3 million ringgit (16.5 million dollars) in the country's biggest seizure of the hypnotic drug Nimetazepam, a news report said Tuesday.

Police also detained six locals in Sunday's pre-dawn raid on a factory in the southern Johor state, said federal narcotics chief Zulhasnan Najib Baharuddin.

Cotabato City, Philippines - A homemade bomb exploded along a highway in a southern Philippine city on Tuesday, but no one was hurt in the third bomb attack this week in the area, a local official said.

The bomb, made from a 60-millimetre mortar shell, went off as a passenger bus passed on the highway in the village of Tamontaka in Cotabato City, 960 kilometres south of Manila.

"It would appear that the bomb was intended for the Husky Bus Company," Cotabato City Mayor Muslimin Sema said.

London  - A 23-year-old Australian man was charged Monday in connection with an alleged bomb hoax which prompted the evacuation of an Emirates plane shortly after landing in London, the authorities said.

Matthew Carney was charged with communicating information believed to be false with the intention of inducing "a false belief that a thing liable to explode or ignite was present in the cargo of a plane."

Carney, who is from Melbourne, did not enter a plea when he appeared at Crawley Magistrates' Court Monday, the court said. He was remanded in custody to appear via a prison video link on March 26.

Winnenden  - Pupils in the German town of Winnenden resumed classes Monday, almost two weeks after a teenager killed 16 people in one of Germany's worst school shootings.

The regional schools' director Wolfgang Schiele declared that compulsory attendance resumed Monday, although the Albertville secondary school building, where the shooting took place, is to remain closed.

For the time being, classes for the school's 580 students are being held in community halls in and around Winnenden, until they can be assigned to other schools in the area.