NICOSIA (AP) – Cypriot police say a Canadian man has been found bludgeoned to death at the bottom of a gorge near a southern coastal resort. Police spokesman Michalis Katsounodos said yesterday the victim has been identified as 39-year-old Sergy Nalyvaisky, a Canadian citizen of Ukrainian descent. The coroner’s office says Nalyvaisky suffered multiple head injuries caused by a blunt instrument before his body was thrown into the 330-foot (100-meter) gorge. Katsounodos says Nalyvaisky arrived on the island June 27 and was staying at a hotel in the southern coastal resort of Limassol. He had been due to leave yesterday. His body was discovered by a hiker Wednesday 34 kilometers (21 miles) east of Limassol, near the Aphrodite’s Rock tourist attraction.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia’s war crimes court yesterday sentenced a former Serb policeman to 14 years in jail for crimes against humanity in a massacre of more than 200 Muslims and Croats early in the country’s 1992-95 war. Damir Ivankovic, 39, had struck a plea bargaining deal with the court confessing to participating in the killing in central Bosnia that ocurred on August 21, 1992 and pledging to testify in future proceedings. The victims, all men, were told they were being released in a prisoner exchange and were driven from the Trnopolje detention camp to some woods in central Bosnia. There, the prisoners were forced to kneel by the edge of a ravine and shot. A dozen survived by tumbling or jumping down the cliff.

BANJA LUKA (AFP) – Around 1,000 Bosnian Serb police will provide security for a Muslim ceremony next week marking 14 years since the Srebrenica massacre, the Serb Republic’s Interior Ministry said yesterday. Thousands of Muslims are expected to attend the July 11 ceremony in which about 500 newly identified massacre victims are to be buried, according to organizers.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt will meet with the lawyer of Radovan Karadzic to discuss whether he will testify in the former Bosnian Serb leader’s war crimes trial, his ministry said yesterday. Karadazic’s lawyer requested the meeting “to know whether to ask Mr Bildt to testify or not,” Carl Henrik Ehrenkrona, the general director for the ministry’s legal service, told AFP. “There are discussions going on to find the proper time and place,” he added, declining to give further details. Bildt was a mediator for the EU in the Balkans conflict, before becoming the first postwar high representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina in December 1995. (AFP)

Serbia’s national airline JAT Airways has resumed flights between Belgrade and the Croatian seaside resort of Dubrovnik after 18 years. Belgrade-Dubrovnik flights were suspended in 1991 because of Croatia’s war for independence from the Serb-led Yugoslavia. JAT says it will fly between the two cities on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the summer tourist season. (AP)

The head of Romania’s Catholic Church has called on the president to intervene to stop the construction of a high-rise office building next to the Catholic cathedral. Bishop Ioan Robu says the 19-story building is “hideous” and “illegal” because it has been built higher than its original plans. He said it is a risk for the foundations of the 19th-century St Joseph Cathedral. (AP)

A British artist vowed yesterday not to return to his home in Turkey until his freedom is guaranteed after fleeing amid fears he may face fresh legal action over a collage portraying its premier as a dog. Michael Dickinson was acquitted by a Turkish court in September last year over his work “Good Boy,” showing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the body of a dog on a leash made from the US flag. Dickinson says it was an Iraq war protest. But now the ruling has been overturned. Dickinson’s Turkish lawyer Volkan Gultekin said this was on grounds including that he knew the country’s ways and customs, having lived in Turkey for 23 years. Dickinson, who is now living near his native city of Durham, northeast England, labeled the decision “pretty stupid.” “I don’t intend to go back until I know I will be able to walk around in freedom,” he told AFP. (AFP)