Two Spanish pro-Tibet groups filed a lawsuit, claiming the seven officials were responsible for at least 203 deaths, more than 1,000 injured and nearly 6,000 illegal arrests and disappearances during the March protests.

Investigative magistrate Santiago Pedraz said the court is entitled to investigate under Spain's principle of universal jurisdiction for cases dealing with charges, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, regardless of where they were allegedly committed.

The statement names Defense Minister Lian Guanglie and State Security Minister Geng Huichang among the seven. Two army officials and two senior Communist Party officials are also being probed.

After studying the evidence, the judge will decided if there is sufficient evidence to file charges.

The Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing said it had seen the news reports on the matter but had no immediate comment.

The groups filing the suit were named as the Tibet Support Committee and the House of Tibet Private Foundation.

In recent years, Spanish magistrates have used the principle of universal jurisdiction several times to pursue cases in different countries, most notably against members of former military regimes in Latin America, but extraditions and convictions have been rare.

In a separate case, the Madrid court has also been reviewing since 2006 another lawsuit filed by the Tibet Support Committee against several former Chinese officials for alleged genocide in the years after Chinese Communist troops entered Tibet in 1951.

Security guards swiftly tackled and pinned the man to the ground following the incident in St. Peter's Square in June 2007.

The 28-year-old, who suffers from a bipolar disorder, was put Monday on four years' probation, the Waldshut-Tiengen state court in southwestern Germany said in a statement.

To avoid being sent to a psychiatric hospital during that period, he must begin psychotherapy and continue with medication he is already taking and undergo regular checkups, the court said.

He also was banned "categorically" from consuming alcohol and drugs, and must undergo regular urine tests, the court said. The man was not identified in the statement, in keeping with German court practice.

It said the man's health has "stabilized significantly" over the year since the incident, and that the conditions attached to Monday's verdict should encourage a further improvement.

The German-born pontiff was not harmed in last year's incident and appeared not to have even noticed. He did not look back and kept on waving and blessing the crowd.

South Korea introduced the ban in 1987 to try to prevent abortions of female fetuses in a country that had traditionally favored sons in the widespread Confucian belief that males carry on family lines. Abortion has also been illegal but practiced widely.

On Thursday, the Constitutional Court said it was too restrictive to ban doctors from telling parents the gender of the unborn for the entire pregnancy because there was little chance of aborting fetuses older than six months due to risks for mothers.

Most German state smoking laws permit larger venues to provide smoking rooms for their patrons, but the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled this is unconstitutional.

Ruling on appeals brought by owners of one-room pubs in the states of Baden Wuerttemberg and Berlin, the court said smoking bans with exceptions discriminate against the smaller venues.

The court ordered states to review their laws, giving parliaments until the end of next year either to ban smoking in all establishments entirely or to revise the exceptions allowed in their laws.

Germany has banned smoking nationwide in government buildings but leaves jurisdiction of bars, restaurants and other public places to the nation's 16 states — all of which have enacted their own varying restrictions.

Spain's National Court on Sunday jailed seven people on charges of belonging to a militant cell of the Basque separatist group ETA.

The cell is believed responsible for a string of recent bombings, and investigators believe its members were planning more attacks.

The seven will be held in provisional preventive custody pending a full trial, anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon said in a statement. A date for the trial was not given.

All seven were detained Tuesday in police raids in the Basque towns of Getxo and Elorrio. Among those jailed was the suspected leader of the cell, Arkaitz Goikoetxea.

Garzon said the cell was suspected of having perpetrated many recent attacks, including the May car bombing of a police barracks in Legutiano, northern Spain, in which one officer died.

After the detentions, Goikoetxea led officers to two caches of explosives and other terror-related material, including tranquilizers to sedate kidnap victims, the judge said in the statement.

Russian authorities are hoping to make legal history by applying an American racketeering law in a Moscow court as they seek to recover billions of dollars in damages from the Bank of New York Mellon.

Hearings resume Monday in the Russian Federal Customs Service's $22.5 billion lawsuit against the bank, which was at the center of a major money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s.

In a highly unusual move, Russia has brought the case under a famous U.S. law used to fight organized crime, and both sides have drawn on the expert opinion of some of America's best-known legal minds in preparing their case.

The Russians have brought in Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Robert Blakey, one of the authors of the 1970 statute on racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations, or RICO. Bank of New York Mellon lawyers are fielding Richard Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney general and Pennsylvania governor.

The RICO statue has never been successfully ruled on in a foreign court, according to lawyers. If the Moscow court agrees to apply the U.S. law, some lawyers predict it would open the floodgates for a slew of similar claims.