ANKARA - Turkey has decided to shut down six under-used airports as part of cost-cutting measures to overcome an economic crisis, authorities said yesterday. The airports, which had low passenger service, did not attract sufficient flights and recent economic problems in the country had forced the cancellation of already scarce lines, the state airport management said in a statement. The decision will shut down the airports in the northern cities of Sinop, Tokat and Zonguldak, Usak in the west and Sivas in central Turkey. The sixth airport, in the northwestern city of Balikesir was to remain open only for army use. The airports will reopen when they become commercially viable, the statement said. (AFP)

SARAJEVO - Bosnia yesterday criticized the linking of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to terrorism, which it said could lead to his exclusion from talks to resolve the Middle East crisis. “We find it unacceptable to consider Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his movement a terrorist group, excluding him through that from talks on resolving the Middle East crisis,” the Bosnian Foreign Ministry said. The reaction was in reference to a statement by US Vice President Dick Cheney, who last week accused Arafat of being directly implicated in a foiled arms-smuggling operation to the Palestinian territories. (AFP)

Hundreds of Romanian citizens jostled with police and jeered authorities yesterday, demanding that the government return money they lost when a fraudulent investment fund collapsed. Chanting, “Down with the government!” the protesters gathered outside the Senate in downtown Bucharest to demand restitution. The protest was one of more than a dozen that have occurred since the National Investment Fund collapsed in May 2000. (AP)

An Armenian citizen has been arrested on suspicion of spying for Turkey, Armenian security officials said yesterday. The alleged spy gathered military, economic and political information for Turkish intelligence, the press service of the National Security Ministry said. (AP)

One of the Bosnian Serbs accused of running the notorious Keraterm camp during the Bosnian war has surrendered to the UN war crimes tribunal, court spokesman Jim Landale said yesterday. “Dusan Fustar voluntarily surrendered to the tribunal,” said Landale. He said Fustar had been living in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian-Serb entity in Bosnia. Fustar, 47, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1992 for supervising guards at the Keraterm prison camp in an old ceramics factory near the town of Prijedor. (AFP)

Truckers traveling between the Serb part of Bosnia and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro are carrying messages between the fugitive Bosnian-Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic and his family, one of the drivers said yesterday. He said the truckers call the message system the “Karadzic connection.” “No trucker would refuse to pass a message from Bosnia to Montenegro,” said the trucker, who asked not to be named. The report implied that Karadzic was still living in the Serb part of Bosnia. (AFP)