Severed and swallowed fingers, Frankenstein tanks, snack-packed heroin, and the day it rained marijuana — welcome to your weekly round-up of the strangest events in international crime from us here at OCCRP.

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who has been living in exile in Belgium, denounced on Tuesday a court decision that upheld an eight-year prison sentence which will ban him from running for public office for 25 years.

The U.S. Department of Treasury announced on Wednesday that the largest German investment and financial services provider Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay two settlements totaling US$583,100 for facilitating transactions that violated Ukraine-related sanctions.

Research shows that gun smugglers have taken to trafficking weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border in small batches so as to avoid detection and seizures by the authorities.

Less than a month after Russia’s leading opposition figure and fierce Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny survived a poisoning attack, unknown assailants spilled on Tuesday a foul-smelling substance at the premises of the Navalny-backed Siberian opposition in Novosibirsk.

Although the United States has given no indication that it is presently investigating any of the country’s former presidents, Mexico’s current leader has said he would be willing to extradite one of his predecessors were he asked to do so.

The EU plans to close the legislative and technical loopholes that allow money laundering to remain rampant in many EU states, Raluca Pruna, the head of the European Commission’s Financial Crime Unit, said in an interview with AML intelligence last week.

A Pakistani journalist said he has been receiving death threats since he exposed the US$100 million fortune the family of one of the country’s most powerful army generals accumulated as he went through promotions.

Measures taken by governments to restrict the spread of the coronavirus have led to more sexual abuse cases and especially “children may be at an increased risk of sexual exploitation both online and offline,” Interpol warned on Monday.

Anti-corruption authorities are investigating the offshore companies of two brothers that are on the brink of receiving hundreds of millions in compensation from the country’s largest state run bank following a ruling that is being described as a colossal failure of the Ukrainian justice system.