World Scene

EGYPT

Mubarak to seek fifth term

CAIRO — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will seek a fifth and final six-year term in September elections and will name a civilian vice president if he wins, British newspapers said this week, quoting the presidential spokesman.

The spokesman, Suleiman Awad, yesterday denied making the remarks when he met with reporters for British press this week.

But several British newspapers had quoted Mr. Awad as saying Mr. Mubarak, 77, would seek another term this year.

Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) wants him as its candidate in September, but the president has not said in public whether he will accept.

FRANCE

Court convicts 3 in shoe-bomb case

PARIS — A top French court jailed three men for terrorist conspiracy yesterday after finding them guilty of helping “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid, who narrowly failed to destroy a U.S. airliner over the Atlantic.

The court found they had helped Reid during his stay in Paris ahead of his abortive attempt to destroy a Paris-to-Miami American Airlines flight over the Atlantic in December 2001 with a bomb hidden inside one of his shoes.

Jacqueline Rebeyrotte, presiding judge at the main Paris criminal court, sentenced Ghulam Rama, 67, a Pakistani with joint British nationality, to five years in prison and expulsion from France once his sentence is served. His co-accused, Frenchmen Hakim Mokhfi and Hassan El Cheguer, both 31, were jailed for four years each, with one year suspended.

BRITAIN

Mrs. Reagan falls in hotel room

LONDON — Former first lady Nancy Reagan slipped and fell early yesterday in her London hotel room and was taken to a hospital for examination and released, her chief of staff said.

Mrs. Reagan, who turns 84 on July 6, wasn’t hurt and doctors sent her back to the hotel for rest, spokeswoman Joanne Drake said from her office at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California.

“She took a fall at the hotel. She had some pain, and they took her to the hospital,” Miss Drake said, adding that Mrs. Reagan was on an approximately 10-day, private vacation to Britain. Mrs. Reagan was released a short time later.

GUATEMALA

Highland mudslide kills villagers

GUATEMALA CITY — A mudslide in a Guatemalan highland town killed at least 21 persons, and the government said yesterday it feared more may be dead.

Torrential rain caused a mudslide Wednesday night that buried houses and cars in the town of San Antonio Senahu, northeast of the capital.

A mudslide buried 10 houses and killed at least 14 persons in the same town five years ago. San Antonio Senahu is in the Central American nation’s coffee growing region of Alta Verapaz.

From wire dispatches and staff reports