UK Police Charge Man In Student Murders

Police in London charged an unemployed 33-year-old man Wednesday in the stabbing murders of two French students - a frenzied killing that shocked people on both sides of the English Channel.

Two other people were also arrested Wednesday, police announced later.

Metropolitan police charged Nigel Edward Farmer with the murders of Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo on June 29. Farmer was scheduled to appear at Greenwich magistrate court Thursday.

Farmer was also charged with arson and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Police also said they arrested a 35-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman in connection with the killings. The two, whom police did not identify, were taken into custody in south London.

The burned bodies of the victims were discovered in an apartment by firefighters. Bonomo had been stabbed nearly 200 times and Ferez nearly 50 times. The attack was so ferocious the press dubbed the killings the "Tarantino murders" because its senseless brutality is reminiscent of movies by the American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.

The French victims, both 23, were promising bioengineering students taking part in a three-month DNA research project at Imperial College in London, one of Britain's top universities. Ferez had visited Bonomo's apartment in the New Cross area of south London on June 29. That night, neighbors called police when they heard what sounded like an explosion and saw the ground-floor apartment ablaze.

Police initially thought the men died in the fire, but autopsies showed they had been stabbed to death.

Their murders prompted some French journalists to depict London as a city of mean streets, rampant crime and "no-go" areas.

Police and residents in London are already alarmed by a rising number of knife attacks. Nineteen teenagers have been killed violently in London this year, compared to 27 in all of 2007. Most were stabbed, and police in the city say the fight against knife crime has overtaken terrorism as their top priority.

Farmer turned himself in to a London police station Monday and was treated for burns in the hospital before being questioned and, ultimately, charged. Police said they are still appealing for witnesses and information about the incident. They will continue to carry out forensic examinations of the apartment where the two men were killed.