DIYARBAKIR (AFP) – A powerful car bomb exploded yesterday near a military base in Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, killing four people, officials said. Sixty-eight others were injured in the explosion which occurred as a military vehicle was passing on a road in the city center, some 100 meters from a military base and billets, Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu told reporters here. He said the car bomb was set off by remote control and that a security operation was under way in the city to catch the perpetrators. Four of the injured were badly wounded, Mutlu added. Hospital sources said the wounded include soldiers and civilians as well as high school students attending private lessons at a nearby building. Media reports suggested the dead could all be students. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, but Diyarbakir has been targeted repeatedly by Kurdish rebels fighting a separatist campaign that has raged since 1984.

PRISTINA (AFP) – The UN mission in Kosovo yesterday urged the majority of detainees at the breakaway Serbian province’s biggest prison to end five days of hunger strikes. “The health, both physical and psychological, of prisoners and detainees are of great concern to UNMIK, the families of prisoners/detainees and others concerned,” the UN mission said in a letter to the strikers. “UNMIK, therefore, urges prisoners/detainees to end their protest immediately,” it added. Some 480 of the 688 inmates at Dubrava Prison, west of the capital Pristina, began a hunger strike on Saturday and issued a range of demands including temporary leave, unrestricted visits, the right to conditional release, amnesty and the reduction of sentences.

Croatia’s navy seized an Italian trawler in Croatian territorial waters yesterday, in the first such incident since Zagreb enforced a protected fishing zone in the Adriatic despite opposition from the European Union. “According to my information, a Croatian military ship caught an Italian trawler illegally present in (Croatia’s) territorial waters. The trawler has been taken to a port on the (southern Adriatic) island of Vis for an investigation,” a Transport and Maritime Ministry official told Reuters. (Reuters)