ANKARA (AP) – Eight Turkish soldiers being court-martialed for insubordination after being held hostage by Kurdish rebels for two weeks were freed Saturday pending a verdict, the Anatolia news agency reported. The soldiers were captured by rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) during an ambush on October 21 on a military unit in Turkey’s southeast, near the border with Iraq, which also left 12 troops dead and 17 injured.

ZENICA (AFP) – Up to 5,000 people rallied in Bosnia-Herzegovina Saturday to express support for former Arab fighter Imad al-Husini, also known as Abu Hamza, who was stripped of his Bosnian citizenship and risks being deported. “People who have not done anything wrong are being declared a threat to national security,” Aiman Awad, head of the Ensarije association of naturalized Arab ex-fighters told the gathering. The rally, dubbed “Forgive Us, Hamza,” was organized by Ensarije and Zenica-based associations of decorated veterans of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Abu Hamza arrived in Bosnia during the war to fight with the Bosnian army’s El Mujahed unit, notorious for criminal activities.

Turkey launched oil exploration in the Gulf of Saros in the Aegean Sea, which it shares with Greece, on Saturday, Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said. The state oil firm TPAO also announced it would start oil exploration with Brazil’s Petrobras in the Black Sea in 2009, rather than 2011 as planned previously. (Reuters)

Nine British soldiers were charged in connection with a brawl that left one soldier in the hospital with a skull fracture in a coastal Cypriot resort, officials said yesterday. Eight of the soldiers appeared briefly at a police station in Ayia Napa, where all nine were formally charged. The charges included causing grievous bodily harm, causing malicious damage and disturbing the peace, Cypriot police said. It was unclear what triggered the fight in the early hours of Saturday. (AP)

Pope Benedict XVI had talks Saturday with Kosovo’s President Fatmir Sedjiu, a Vatican statement said, while holding off on any comment on the future status of the Serbian province. “The audience with the highest institutional authority of the current autonomous province of Serbia... does not represent any change in the position of the Holy See vis-a-vis the definitive juridical status of Kosovo,” it said. (AFP)