A fire chief who lost his job after being accused of theft has been jailed in southeast Nebraska.

John Porter surrendered to Lincoln police on Wednesday morning. A Lancaster County jailer says the 46-year-old Porter is still in custody, awaiting court action on the theft allegation. Online court records don’t list the case yet.

The board of the Southeast Fire & Rescue Department in Lincoln dismissed Porter on Feb. 1. Turner has denied the board’s allegations that he stole thousands from the department by manipulating accounts.

 

(AP) — A 19-year-old Lincoln man was sentenced to 11 to 22 years in prison after being convicted of dragging two Lincoln police officers who clung to his car as they tried to arrest him.

Shahbaz Mohammad was sentenced Wednesday. He had pleaded no contest in March to second-degree assault on an officer and operating a motor vehicle to avoid arrest.

The incident with police occurred Oct. 14 during a traffic stop. Mohammad gave another man’s name to police, and when officers asked him to get out of the car he drove off.

He dragged two officers, one for about 130 feet and the other for 10 blocks.

The car ran over one officer’s knee, and he couldn’t resume full duty for a month.

UPDATE:

Three college friends of the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect are accused of removing a backpack from his dorm room — a backpack containing fireworks that had been emptied of gunpowder. According to charges filed today, they did so three days after the attack.

Two of the men are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice. A third is charged with making false statements. The affidavit says the two facing the obstruction of justice charges agreed to get rid of the backpack after concluding from news reports that their friend, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was one of the bombers.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Boston police say three more suspects have been taken into custody in the marathon bombings.

In a tweet Wednesday morning, the police department says only that three more suspects are in custody and more details will follow. Police spokeswoman Cheryl Fiandaca confirmed the tweet but referred all other questions to the FBI.

Three people were killed and more than 260 injured on April 15 when two bombs exploded near the finish line.

Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a gunfight with police several days later. His brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was captured and lies in a hospital prison.

Both are Russian natives who lived for several years in the U.S. They are accused of using a weapon of mass destruction.

A 28-year-old Omaha man has been given 45 years in prison for the slaying of another Omaha man.

Court records say Horace Amerson was sentenced on Tuesday in Douglas County District Court. He’d pleaded guilty after prosecutors reduced a murder charge to manslaughter and dropped one of two weapons charges.

Police say Amerson fired a dozen shots on March 8, 2011, into the parking lot of a Family Dollar Store. One of the bullets struck and killed 36-year-old Jarrod Maxwell.

Amerson said he’d been seeking revenge for the shooting of his brother, Jonas Amerson. But prosecutors said Maxwell had nothing to do with that slaying.