Vienna - Austrian energy drink producer Red Bull reported Wednesday that its 2008 sales reached 3.32 billion euros (4.28 billion dollars), up 7.9 per cent, less than half the previous year's 16.6 per cent rise.

At 79 per cent, sales growth was especially strong in the Far East, with the Middle East (31 per cent) and South America (26 per cent) also boosting revenue, Austrian press agency APA reported Wednesday.

Red Bull founder and co-owner Dietrich Mateschitz said last week that the growth rate in the United States had slowed down since October, falling to single digits.

Munich/Vienna - A man suspected of having killed and dismembered a salesman in Munich was arrested in Austria, the Munich police said Wednesday.

The victim's arms were found last Friday in the Isar river in the German state of Bavaria, while the torso of the 35-year-old man was found in the Czech Republic.

The alleged killer is a German national born in 1969, an Austrian police official told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The suspect was caught near Nickelsdorf on the Hungarian border on Tuesday evening, according to Austrian press agency APA.

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Vienna - An Austrian woman has started a 500-day prison term after having ignored a host of parking tickets, a police official in the town of Graz confirmed Tuesday.

By ignoring 700 attempts by police to notify her about her parking violations in the past two years, the 38-year-old woman from Graz accumulated some 25,000 euros
(32,000 dollars) in fines which she was unable to pay.

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Vienna - India signed an inspection agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday, fulfilling a main precondition before nuclear exporting countries can start to supply India's growing atomic power sector.

India's ambassador Saurabh Kumar signed the so-called safeguards agreement at the IAEA's Vienna headquarters, the IAEA confirmed. In a next step, the pact has to be ratified by the Indian government.

Under the 2006 civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the United States, the South Asian atomic weapons state agreed to separate its military and civilian nuclear facilities.