The Metropolitan Police are investigating an alleged "malicious communication" received by Queens Park Rangers football club on Friday.

At least 32 people have died in a suicide car bomb attack near a funeral procession in Baghdad.Half of the victims were policemen guarding the march, in the latest brazen attack since the US troop withdrawal fromIraq.Police officials said the blast occurred in the mainly Shiite neighbourhood of Zafaraniyah, where mourners had gathered for the funeral of a person killed the day before. They said 65 people were wounded, including 16 policemen.Salam Hussein, a 42-year-old grocery store owner in Zafaraniyah said he was watching the funeral procession, which was heavily guarded by police, when the blast blew out his store windows and injured one of his workers."It was a huge explosion," Hussein said. As he took his worker to the hospital, Hussein said he saw cars engulfed in flames, "human flesh scattered around and several mutilated bodies in a pool of blood" around where the attacker's car had exploded.Zafaraniyah resident Talib Bashir, 50, said he was part of the procession of about 500 men but left the group to take his child home when he heard the blast."I saw smoke coming from a parked car that had exploded," Bashir said, adding that police and civilians cars, an ambulance van and several stores were engulfed in flames hours after the blast. "The fire lasted for a long time," Bashir said.Minutes after the blast, gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint in Zafaraniyah, killing two policemen, according to police officials.Across Iraq, at least 200 people have been killed in a wave of attacks by suspected insurgents since the beginning of the year, raising concerns that the surge in violence and an escalating political crisis might deteriorate into a civil war, just weeks after the US military withdrawal.Most of the dead have been Shiite pilgrims and members of the Iraqi security forces. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest attack.Since the United States completed its pullout last month, militant groups - mainly al Qaida in Iraq - have stepped up attacks targeting the country's majority Shiites to undermine confidence in the Shiite-led government and its efforts to protect people without American backup.On Thursday, 17 people died in bombings around the country, including seven people in attacks on Baghdad's s two predominantly Sunni districts, suggesting that Shiite militants could be retaliating amid fears of a reignited sectarian conflict in the war-ravaged country.The latest blast is the second deadliest single attack in Iraq this month. At least 53 people were killed January 14, when a bomb tore through a procession of Shiite pilgrims heading toward a largely Sunni town in southern Iraq.

Armed forces loyal to President Bashar Assad have been accused of massacring at least 30 people in renewed violence in Syria.Activists said government troops fired on homes with mortars and machine guns. A family of women and children were reported to be among the victims during a day of sectarian killings and kidnappings in the besieged city of Homs.The violence erupted yesterday, but important details were only emerging today.Video posted online by activists showed the bodies of five small children, five women of varying ages and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the Karm el-Zaytoun neighbourhood of the city. A narrator said an entire family had been "slaughtered."Heavy gunfire erupted for a second day in the city, which has seen some of the heaviest violence of the 10-month-old uprising against Assad's rule. Activists said at least 10 people were killed across the country, four of them in Homs.Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, quoting witnesses on the ground.In an attempt to stop the bloodshed, the UN Security Council was to hold a closed-door meeting to discuss the crisis, a step toward a possible resolution against the Damascus regime.The UN says at least 5,400 people have been killed in the government crackdown since March, and the turmoil has intensified as dissident soldiers have joined the ranks of the anti-Assad protesters.Details of Thursday's wave of killings in Homs were emerging from residents and activists."There has been a terrifying massacre," said Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of theSyrian Observatory for Human Rights, calling for an independent investigation.The day started with a spate of sectarian kidnappings and killings between the city's population of Sunnis and Allawites, a Shiite sect to which Assad belongs and which is the backbone of his regime, said Mohammad Saleh, an opposition figure in Homs.There were also a string of attacks by unknown gunmen on army checkpoints. The violence culminated with the evening killing of the family, Saleh said.The Observatory said 29 people were killed, including eight children, when a building came under heavy mortar and machine gun fire. Some residents spoke of another massacre that took place when shabiha - armed regime loyalists - stormed the district, slaughtering residents in an apartment, including children."It's racial cleansing," said one Sunni resident of Karm el-Zaytoun.The death toll in Homs city was at least 35, said the Observatory and the Local Co-ordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists.Iran's official IRNA news agency said gunmen in Syria have kidnapped 11 Iranian pilgrims travelling by road from Turkey to Damascus.Iranian pilgrims routinely visit Syria - Iran's closest ally in the Arab world - to pay homage to Shiite holy shrines.UN rights chief Navi Pillay, speaking at the Davos Forum in Switzerland, expressed "great concern that the killings are continuing and in my view it's the authorities who are killing civilians, and so it would all stop if an order comes from the top to stop the killings."Assad's regime claims terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy are behind the uprising. International pressure on Damascus to end the bloodshed so far has produced few results.The Arab League has sent observers to the country, but the mission has been widely criticised for failing to stop the violence. Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia pulled out of the mission.The UN Security Council has been unable to agree on a resolution since violence began in March because of strong opposition from Russia and China.A senior Russian diplomat said Moscow will oppose a new draft United Nations resolution on Syria because it fails to take Kremlin's concerns into account.

A man with a recipe for the deadly poison Ricin and documents about how to make bombs has been jailed for two years and three months.Asim Kausar, 25, from Bolton, Greater Manchester, had the information on a computer memory stick which contained details about the toxin ricin, assassination and torture techniques, and how to construct improvised explosive devices (IEDs).The documents were entitled Improvised Munitions Handbook and Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques.The information only came to light after Kausar's family suffered a burglary and the memory stick was handed to police so officers could view CCTV images of the break-in recorded on the device. Kausar's hoard of terror-related information was found when police analysed the memory stick.He told officers he had downloaded the information out of "curiosity and a thirst for knowledge".Kausar pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing at Manchester Crown Court to four counts of collecting a record of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism between January 1 2009 and June 4 2011.The prosecution accepted the defendant had not disseminated the information and had not put it to any practical use. There was also no evidence to suggest Kausar had any links to terrorists or had tried to pass the information on to others.Sentencing him, the Recorder of Manchester, Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said: "I accept that all of this material is available on the internet and can be bought from retailers such as Amazon and I accept some of it is out of date."But that makes them no less dangerous or any less useful to a person committing an act of terrorism."Miss Riel Karmy-Jones, prosecuting, said the defendant had "scoured the internet" between January 2009 and his arrest last year for information on the mujahideen.The information downloaded ran into thousands of pages of documents.Following a burglary at the family home, his father, Naseem, handed in a memory device which he thought contained evidence of the raid on CCTV but instead it was material which incriminated his son.Also contained in the documents was a letter written by Kausar which said: "I want to fight jihad for Allah."The prosecutor said: "In the letter he also asked a series of questions - whether he would be able to fight and whether his martyrdom would be accepted."When his bedroom was searched officers found what appeared to be a "shopping list" of munitions, she said.Prices were marked down next to entries of various weapons and ammunition.His mobile phone was also seized which contained a photograph of Kausar posing with an AK rifle - believed to have been taken in Pakistan.Mukhtar Hussain QC, defending, said his client came from "a respectable and well-liked family".Numerous character references were sent to the judge, including from neighbours who spoke of their shock about learning of the incident.Mr Hussain said it may never be known why Kausar downloaded the material, although the defendant told detectives it was borne out of "schoolboy curiosity".However, an incident involving his sister's husband did have an effect on him.The court was told that Kausar's brother-in-law was killed in a bomb blast in Pakistan while trying to protect the late Benazir Bhutto as part of her security entourage.His sister was now living in Bolton with her two children."We cannot put before you that he was clinically depressed," Mr Hussain told the judge. "What his parents had noticed though was that he was clearly traumatised by those events."Pleading for a sentence at the lower end of the scale for this type of offending, he said: "The conviction will bring a stigma to the family that they will have to live with for a long time."Kausar has already spent 232 days in custody and has a previous conviction for battery.Judge Gilbart said there was no evidence that the offending went beyond collecting information but was satisfied "it went beyond mere idle curiosity"."I am entirely prepared t