Pakistan floods toll reaches 800

Flooding in Pakistan has killed more than 800 people in a week, a government official said as rescuers struggled to reach marooned victims.

Read Full Story

Have Your Shout

Leadership hopefuls' final hustings

Labour leadership hopefuls are to face hundreds of party members in the final hustings before the vote begins to replace Gordon Brown.

Read Full Story

Have Your Shout

'Counties' may be dropped from post

Counties could be dropped from postal addresses on letters and parcels, it has been reported.

Read Full Story

Have Your Shout

Get posting in the Star Forums!

You can join the debate and post your own views in the lively Daily Star Forums!

AUSCHWITZ GATE SIGN RECOVERED

ABOVE: The infamous sign at Auschwitz has been recovered by police

21st December 2009

Polish police have found the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign that was stolen on Friday from the gate of former Nazi death camp Auschwitz.

Spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said police also detained five men aged between 25 and 39 and were planning to question them.

Ms Padlo said the sign, which symbolises to the world the atrocities and cruelty of Nazi Germany, had been cut into three pieces.

Ms Padlo said the sign was found on Sunday night in northern Poland, the other end of the country from the southern Polish town where the Auschwitz memorial museum is located and where it disappeared before dawn on Friday.

Police refused to divulge any details of the circumstances in which the sign was found or to speculate on the motive of the perpetrators.

The theft set off an international outcry at the disappearance of one of the most chilling and best known symbols of the Holocaust. State authorities made finding it a priority and appealed to all Poles for assistance.

Museum authorities welcomed the news with huge relief despite the damage done to the sign. Spokesman Pawel Sawicki said conservation experts will have to determine how best to repair it and added that the museum authorities hope to restore it to its place as soon as possible.

More than one million people, mostly Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles and others, died in the gas chambers or from starvation and disease while performing forced labour at Auschwitz, which Nazi Germany built in occupied Poland during the Second World War.

The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945.

Earlier on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the sign was "of the deepest historical importance to the Jewish people and the whole world, and is a tombstone for more than a million Jews".