SKOPJE - A new separatist paramilitary group linked to an ethnic Albanian politician who is included on a US “terrorist” blacklist has become active in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said. Georgievski told reporters late on Wednesday that the government had received information from NATO that the group had about 200 members, mainly young men armed with light weapons. He said it was going by the name of Ilirida and hinted at the involvement of hardline ethnic Albanian politician Nevzet Halili, the former leader of the separatist Party of Democratic Prosperity. “There is evidence of a bigger regrouping on the ground,” the prime minister said. Halili was recently put on a US State Department list of suspected terrorists. Georgievski frequently accuses ethnic Albanian rebels of rearming in breach of a peace accord signed with the government last year which ended a seven-month armed uprising. The Albanian minority makes up about one-third of FYROM’s 2 million people. (AFP)

SARAJEVO - The UN police team fighting human trafficking carried out hundreds of raids and freed dozens of women forced to work in Bosnia as prostitutes, officials said yesterday. The Special Trafficking Operations Project, or STOP, marked its first year yesterday by releasing a report outlining its progress. The unit, consisting of international and local officers, conducted 600 raids on nightclubs, private houses and other premises throughout the country — raids that led to the release of 182 women who had been forced to work as sex slaves, said Celhia de Lavarene, a UN adviser on gender issues in Bosnia and the project’s leader. Most of the women were from Moldova, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Many had been lured by newspaper advertisements promising bogus jobs in the West. The judiciary system in Bosnia, however, has been slow to recognize trafficking as a crime and prosecute such cases — even though prostitution itself is illegal in Bosnia. Of the 56 people convicted and sentenced as traffickers, only 10 are serving prison sentences. Most have been set free while awaiting appeal. (AP)

Four of seven former military policemen on trial for wartime atrocities against Serbs were back in prison yesterday, a day after the Supreme Court of Croatia annulled a lower court’s decision to release them. Police were still looking for the three others, said Leo Tauber, police spokesman in Split, a southern city where the seven have been on trial since June 10. The group is accused of random arrests of Serbs and Yugoslav army officers in the wake of the 1991 war, which erupted when local Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army, rebelled against Croatia’s independence from the former Yugoslavia. Inmates were held in Split’s military-run camp of Lora, where they were allegedly exposed to torture, including beating and starvation. Two of the inmates died of injuries. The Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted the prosecutor’s appeal against the ruling of the chief judge who set the men free last Monday. (AP)