The Enigma machines were similar in appearance to large typewriters

England have

A coding machine used by the Germans to encode messages during World War II has been stolen from the Bletchley Park Museum in Buckinghamshire, south-east England.

Police said the thief is thought to have carried thecipher machine, which looks like a large typewriter, out of the museum in broad daylight, on a day when the building was open to the public.

It is one of only three such machines in the world, and its value is estimated at more than ?00,000.

Christine Large, the director of the Bletchley Park Trust, said, "This particular one was extra special because it was used by the German SS and was made to a higher standard than the ones which were used in the field. We can only hope we get it back."

Stolen to order

It's thought the machine may have been stolen to order. It is thought more than one person may have been involved in a carefully-planned operation.

The machine was secured in a glass cabinet which had not been broken. There was an alarm system in operation as well as volunteers watching over the collections.

The theft comes just a week before a new security system was to be installed.

'Unbreakable' code

Bletchley Park, a stately home in 50 acres of grounds, was known as Station X during the war. There, British agents succeeded in cracking the Enigma code - a cipher with 150 million million million possible combinations which the Germans thought was unbreakable.

By 1945 there were 10,000 mathematicians, linguists and chess champions working there, decoding up to 18,000 messages a day.

The methods they used - inventing machines which ran through large numbers of possible positions in a short period of time - meant the work at Bletchley Park paved the way for the invention of the modern computer.

Their work is said to have shortened the war by several years. Winston Churchill referred to the staff as "the geese that laid the golden eggs, and never cackled".

Station X was a secret until 1967, but is now a popular tourist attraction.

The US wants Mr Milosevic to stand trial for war crimes

The news came shortly after five single shots and a burst of automatic gun fire were heard at Mr Milosevic's home where he had been surrounded by police for nearly 36 hours.

A senior official from the ex-leader's Socialist Party, Vladimir Ivkovic, said Mr Milosevic had decided to give himself up of his own free will.

'Unbalanced' mental state

Mr Milosevic was thought to have been holed up in the villa with his wife and daughter and about 20 well-armed bodyguards who fought off a police assault on the villa in the early hours of Saturday.

Mr Milosevic earlier insisted that he would "not go to jail alive" and was said to be in an "unbalanced" mental state.

Mr Milosevic faces charges in Yugoslavia of corruption and theft of state funds.

He is also wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

However, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has said the extradition of Mr Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is not his government's immediate priority, despite growing international pressure.

The arrest coincides with the expiry of a US deadline for the Yugoslav government to detain the former president or risk losing substantial American aid and international loans.

A decision on whether to release some $50m of aid is expected on Monday.

cipher machine: 密码机