ZAGREB (AP) – The prime minister promised an investigation yesterday into Croatia’s worst firefighting tragedy, in which six men were killed and seven badly injured when they were trapped battling a fierce forest blaze. The group – including volunteers aged 17 and 18 – was encircled by flames on Thursday when the wind suddenly changed course while they were fighting a fire on Kornat Island, national firefighting chief Mladen Jurin said. Police said eight men had been detained on suspicion of arson. The state-run news agency HINA said the eight were seasonal construction and tourist workers who were allegedly filmed setting the fire by a German tourist. The fire was brought under control early yesterday.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – A new Western plan to revive Bosnia’s stalled reforms so that it can sign a key accord with the European Union gives away too much to the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslim parties say. Bosnia’s international peace overseer, Miroslav Lajcak, invited Muslim, Croat and Serb party leaders this week to discuss a new approach to a merger of Bosnia’s two police forces, a key step toward reconciliation in the divided nation. Details of the plan have not been made public and negotiations have not started, but Bosnian Muslim leaders already dismiss it as a capitulation to Bosnian-Serb defiance. “This is a devaluation of European principles, we could not accept it,” Sulejman Tihic, leader of one of the main Bosnian Muslim parties, told reporters on Thursday. Ethnic Croat parties have been silent. The Bosnian Serbs first refused comment, then said the plan was unacceptable. “His initiative does not back our stance on the police reform and does not represent a compromise solution,” Serb Republic Prime Minister Milorad Dodik told a news conference. “It is unconstitutional,” he said without elaborating.

Bosnian police yesterday arrested a former Bosnian-Serb army commander suspected of war crimes against Muslims during the 1992-95 war in southeastern Bosnia, the third such arrest this week. Ratko Bundalo, 63, was the third suspect arrested on orders of the state prosecutor in connection with atrocities committed in the area of the village of Kalinovik in 1992, the state security agency SIPA said in a statement. The police on Wednesday arrested Bosnian-Serb Djordjislav Askraba, 56, a former guard of a detention camp in Kalinovik. The village’s former police commander Nedjo Zeljaja was arrested a day before. Of more than 1,000 Muslims detained in camps in Kalinovik, some 260 were killed. (Reuters)

Bulgarian customs officers have seized 32.5 kilos (71.5 pounds) of heroin found hidden in a car at a border crossing, police said yesterday. The 41-year-old Bulgarian driver was arrested by border police after the drugs were discovered stashed in the gas tank of the car crossing into Bulgaria from Turkey. Customs officials estimated the value of the drugs at –1.3 million ($1.8 million). (AP)