FT265

An American Air Force captain died after a car tyre she was holding exploded inside her sports car while she was on holiday in Scotland. Jenna Wilcox, 27, and her husband, also a US Air Force captain, had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The accident happened in Edinburgh Road, Dalkeith, Midlothian, at about 6pm on 27 March. Capt Wilcox died at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh five days later. The couple had changed the tyre on the BMW Z3 after noticing a bulge in it, and she was holding it because the boot was full of lugg­age. It is not known what caused the tyre to blow up. Capt. Wilcox had been in the UK since September 2008, and was based at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. Her husband Scott, 27, who is based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, suffered minor injuries. BBC News, 2 April; Aberdeen Press & Journal, 3 April 2010.

Mobile phone number 0888 888 888 was suspended after all three users assigned it in the last 10 years died prematurely. First there was Vladimir Grashnov, former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number, who died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48. There were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning. The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down aged 31 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a 2003 trip to inspect his £500 million drug smuggling empire. The Russian mafia was thought to have been behind the killing. The number then passed to Konstantin Dishliev, an estate agent and major cocaine trafficker, who was gunned down in 2005 outside an Indian restaurant in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. He died after a consignment of the drug valued at £130 million was intercepted by police on its way into the country from Colombia. Since then, the phone number has been dormant while police maintained an open file on Dishliev’s killing. Now phone bosses have suspended the number for good. Callers now get a recorded message saying the phone is “outside network coverage”. D.Telegraph, 26 May 2010.

A widow named Lam was collecting clothes from a drying rack on the balcony of her 27th-floor apartment in the Ma On Shan district of Hong Kong last March when she slipped and plunged to the ground. She landed on Chan Kwai-mui, 51, a cleaner on her way to work. Both women were killed. A couple of weeks later, another widow, this one suicidal, leapt from a 12th-floor balcony and landed on a stranger, killing both of them. Raymonde Demares, 62, dressed in pyjamas, crushed smartly dressed sports journalist Herman Lingg, 72, as he entered the apartment block in Brussels. She had been depressed since the death of her husband. The same thing happened a third time in northern Chile in May, when Josefina Venizela jumped from the 12th floor of a building and landed on Luisa Almendares, a 56-year-old cleaning lady, who happened to be taking out the rubbish from the building next door. Both women were killed. www.weird­asianews.com, 2 Mar; D.Express, 25 Mar; Irish Independent, 29 May 2010.

The severed head and naked torso of a man was found at a temple to the goddess Kali in West Bengal. “The head was smeared with red vermilion,” said Rabindranath Mukherjee, the district police superintendent. “Flowers and incense sticks were scattered beside the body.” A local official said: “This man has been sacrificed to propitiate the gods.” Times, 19 April 2010.