In the World

MEXICO CITY - In a standoff that sent motorists scrambling for cover, municipal police pulled their guns on masked federal agents in one of Mexico's biggest cities - a stark display of the tensions caused by a crackdown on drug corruption among the country's lawmen.

Federal forces are leading sweeps across the country to round up local officers and politicians accused of collaborating with brutal drug cartels. Many city police are furious at seeing colleagues disarmed, humiliated, and dragged away in handcuffs.

Monday evening's confrontation started when federal police showed up to disperse city officers who were protesting the federal raids by blocking several streets in San Nicolas and Escobedo, suburbs of Monterrey, the country's third-largest city.

Seven people were arrested, the state public safety department reported, but officials would not say whether they included any officers. The incident was dramatized in photos published yesterday by Mexican newspapers. One showed a state officer holding his gun against the head of a federal policeman.

- AP

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - After a decade-long search, a team of Baltic Sea divers has discovered the wreckage of a Soviet submarine that sank with dozens of sailors aboard during World War II, one of the divers said yesterday.

The divers found the S-2 submarine near the Aland Islands between Sweden and Finland in February but only announced it yesterday because they wanted to confirm the identity of the vessel, team member Marten Zetterstrom said. He said all 50 crew members died when the vessel exploded in 1940, probably after hitting a mine.

Markus Lindholm, curator of maritime archaeology at Finland's National Board of Antiquities, said the submarine was last spotted at surface level by a lighthouse keeper west of the Aland archipelago. He said the keeper's notes describe how the vessel headed north before diving and entering a Finnish minefield, after which an explosion was heard. - AP

LONDON - A group of Scotland Yard officers were suspended after "serious allegations" about their behavior during the arrests of five suspects last year, police said yesterday.

London's police force did not go into detail, but Sky News television and the Daily Mail and the Times of London newspapers reported that six officers were accused of "waterboarding" drug suspects.

The papers gave varying accounts of the technique used by police, with the Times saying that officers poured water onto a cloth and placed it over a suspect's face to simulate drowning. The Daily Mail said police officers repeatedly dunked the suspects' heads in buckets of water. - AP

An unidentified assailant hurled a bottle of acid in a Hong Kong shopping district Monday night, injuring 24 pedestrians, including a 4-year-old girl, police said. It was the third in a series of acid attacks that have injured about 100 people.