ANKARA (AP) - Police detained 11 members of a pro-Kurdish political party in southeast Turkey yesterday, a day after confiscating documents seized at the party’s offices, the state-owned Anatolia news agency reported. Police seized documents allegedly advocating Kurdish separatism, which are illegal in Turkey, during a search of the local branch of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party in the city of Siirt on Thursday, Anatolia said. Police were interrogating the detained party officials yesterday, including Murat Avci, head of the local party branch. Turkish authorities accuse the party of having close ties to Kurdish separatist guerrillas. Several mayors belonging to the party have been charged with having ties to Kurdish rebels.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romanian prosecutors said yesterday they had charged a government official with taking bribes, the latest step in the country’s race to prove to the European Union that its anti-graft reforms are on track. Radu Prisacaru, the government representative for the eastern county of Iasi, is accused of accepting a 3-hectare plot of land worth 600,000 euros ($770,000) in exchange for facilitating the return of a piece of land to a local businessman under Romania’s complex restitution process.

The UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia yesterday said it would allow convicted Kosovo Albanian Haradin Bala to return to Kosovo for three days to attend his brother’s funeral. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said Bala would be freed on “short-term provisional release” but did not say on which date. The court sentenced Bala, 49, a former member of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), to 13 years in prison on November 30 after he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (AFP)

A sleeping teenager flew home to Bulgaria and then back to Malta after aircrew apparently failed to notice she was still on the plane. Maria Ilieva, 17, was traveling alone and fell asleep on an Air Malta plane taking her overnight from Valletta to Sofia. Unfortunately she had returned to Malta by the time she woke up, the girl’s family said yesterday. “Air Malta officials said the airplane was not a place for sleeping. But I have not seen any signs saying ‘No sleeping,’ I have only seen signs saying ‘No smoking,’” said the girl’s mother, Nadezhda Vulova. (Reuters)

Hollywood actor Richard Gere will start searching for war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic in a new film due to start shooting in Bosnia this month, a local production company said yesterday. Richard Shepard’s light-hearted thriller “Flak Jacket” will also star US actors Jesse Eisenberg and Terrence Howard, who along with Gere play reporters heading to postwar Bosnia on an unauthorized mission to locate Karadzic. The film is based on an article written by Scott Anderson, a journalist who reported on the Bosnian war for Esquire magazine. (Reuters)