There needs to be a full public statement at the end of the inquiry to ensure that public confidence in our police is not damaged.” The case is not the first time that West Midlands officers have been accused of misconduct. The force’s Serious Crimes Squad was disbanded in 1989 after numerous complaints ranging from perjury and fabrication of evidence to fraudulent overtime claims. The most notorious incident involving the force was the case of the Birmingham Six, who were freed in 1991 after serving 16 years in prison for IRA bombings at two city centre pubs in the 1970s which the men had always denied. Charges of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice against three West Midland detectives involved in the case were later dropped..

NICHOLAS SCHOON

Environment Correspondent
Since the last British wolf was hunted to death nearly 250 years ago only one other mammal has become extinct in these islands – the mouse- eared bat.It was Britain’s largest bat, with a wing span more than a foot across. Unusually, it caught beetles and spiders on the ground as well as hunting in the air using echo-location.It was never common here, for the United Kingdom is at the northernmost edge of its European range. The bat was only positively identified in Britain in the Fifties, and its population probably never rose to more than a few hundred.From 1980 onwards, only two males were ever found in the UK. Each year bat conservationists would find the pair hibernating at a winter roost site near Chichester, in West Sussex, along with dozens of other kinds of bat.

One of them failed to turn up in1985; the other was last seen at the roost five years later. And so, two years later, the species was declared extinct in Britain.Now the mouse-eared bat has turned up on a list of 116 declining or endangered animal and plant species drawn up by the Biodiversity Steering Group, a committee of government scientists, academics, wildlife conservation charities and civil servants. The group has proposed rescue plans for each species and the Government will respond in the Spring.The list of 116 includes six species which are probably or certainly now extinct in Britain. Since it has already been lost, the action plan for the mouse-eared bat is rather limited: “Prepare to launch a major conservation initiative should the species recolonise or be rediscovered.”There are no plans to reintroduce the bat artificially from its strongholds in southern and central Europe because the reasons for its extinction here are not understood.But according to the Bat Conservation Trust, the factors which have wreaked havoc with many of Britain’s 14 other bat species are probably to blame. Its hunting grounds of ancient, open woodlands and close-cropped pasture have been reduced by neglect and modern farming.

Roosting sites in buildings which give shelter to hundreds of bats have been destroyed by demolition, fires and the spraying of wood preservative.Two other British bat species are on the list of 116 – the greater horseshoe and the pipistrelle. The pipistrelle is the most common British bat with around 2 million in the country. But its numbers are believed to have fallen by 70 per cent between 1978 and 1993.In the last few years the pipistrelle has been found to consist of two separate species living side by side. Their ultrasonic squeaks, which they use like radar to hunt flying insects, are at two different frequencies..

LIZ HUNT

Health Editor
A breast cancer drug widely credited with reducing death rates in older women with the disease, can cause womb cancer, according to the World Health Organisation.A WHO report, compiled by the world’s leading cancer specialist, will fuel controversy over the drug tamoxifen, now taken by thousands of British women. It concludes: “There is sufficient evidence in humans of the carcinogenicity of tamoxifen of increasing the risk of a tumour originating from the inner lining of the uterus.”While there is little doubt over the benefits of tamoxifen in women with this disease, scientists are divided over its long-term use and its use as a preventive treatment in healthy women with a family history of breast cancer.The Medical Research Council has twice refused to back preventive trials in this group of women. More recently, Dr Richard Bulbrook, a cancer scientist who conducted much of the earlier research into tamoxifen, criticised the United Kingdom drug trial which is now recruiting 20,000 women. Its aim is to determine the long-term versus short-term benefits or otherwise of the drug.Dr Bulbrook said evidence is already strong to show that in the long term the risks of tamoxifen outweigh its benefits. He urged women who had been taking the drug for five or more years to seek medical advice.The conclusion of the new report from International Agency for Research on Cancer, a division of WHO, was revealed at a conference in Lyons, France, last week. It provides the first definitive consensus statement of the drug’s link with womb cancer. Earlier this year, a panel of state scientists in California declared tamoxifen “carcinogenic”.