A French court in Douai has ordered the release of Laurent Serubuga, a former colonel in the Rwandan army and an ethnic Hutu, who is suspected of playing a role in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The court ruled that as the atrocities were committed at a time when the genocide and crimes were committed, they were not punishable by law, Serubuga should not have been charged.

The Dutch government has made a formal apology for the thousands of summary executions it carried out in Indonesia leading up to its independence.

The victims of the killings, committed between 1945 and 1949, were mostly men and the worst atrocities were committed on the island of Sulawesi.

The Syrian regime on Tuesday admitted it possessed chemical weapons and said it will work with the UN and Russia to “halt possession” of the weapons.

Russia on Monday proposed a plan for international monitors to examine the chemical weapons stockpile with a view to destroy them.

The Deputy President  of Kenya, William Ruto, pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity at the Hague today.

A report published by Human Rights Watch today, outlined that evidence from the massacre site suggested that Assad’s regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack.

Kenya’s Deputy President Wiliam Ruto arrived at The Hague today, to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC), on Tuesday.

The Kurdish rebel PKK has halted the withdrawal of its armed cadres from Turkey according to a website linked to the militants.

The PKK blamed Turkey for not moving towards “democratisation and the resolution of the Kurdish problem”.

The President of the United States Barack Obama has said that US plans for military strikes on Syria could be put on hold if Bashar al-Assad’s government agrees to a Russian proposal to place its chemical weapons under international control.

"I want to make sure that norm against use of chemical weapons is maintained," Mr Obama told ABC News.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was probably not behind the order to deploy chemical weapons that killed over a thousand people last month.

German tabloid Bild am Sonntag cited unnamed sources from the German intelligence service.