Items studied after Jacko case raid

Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration spent two-and-a-half hours at Dr Conrad Murray's clinic in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday and left with 21 documents and a "forensic image" of a computer hard drive, the medic's lawyer Ed Chernoff said.

He added: "The search warrant authorised law enforcement to search for and seize items, including documents, they believe constituted evidence of the offence of manslaughter."

Dr Murray served as Jackson's personal physician and was with him when he died. He has been quizzed twice by police in Los Angles as part of their investigation, but has not been considered as a suspect. A third interview is expected to take place later this week

Before the raid by federal drug agents, Mr Chernoff said investigators were seeking more information from his client and additional medical records.

The lawyer added: "The coroner wants to clear up the cause of death, we share that goal. Based on Dr Murray's minute-by-minute and item-by-item description of Michael Jackson's last days, he should not be a target of criminal charges."

Meanwhile, it has emerged that Jackson's death certificate was improperly viewed by at least half a dozen employees at the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

In some cases the staff members, who had no role in investigating the cause of death, appeared to have printed copies before the document became a public record, coroner's official Chief Investigator Craig Harvey told the Los Angeles Times.

"There's only one person in the investigation of Mr Jackson who needed to have a copy of the death certificate, and that was the investigator," Mr Harvey said.

Improper views of the certificate, which is stored in a state-supervised computer system, are a breach of internal rules but not any laws, he said.