BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia and Montenegro accused neighboring Albania yesterday of gross interference in its internal affairs for criticizing Belgrade’s position on the UN-governed province of Kosovo. A Foreign Ministry official said Belgrade lodged a protest after Albania’s legislature denounced last week’s Serbian Parliament declaration which said the predominantly ethnic Albanian province was part of its territory. “This is gross violation and interference in the internal affairs of a neighboring country,” Aleksandra Joksimovic, assistant foreign minister of Serbia and Montenegro, said.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - The remains of more than 320 people have been exhumed from a mass grave in eastern Bosnia which is considered to be the largest from the country’s 1992-95 war, a forensic official said yesterday. “So far, we have found 253 complete skeletons and 72 detached body parts,” Murat Hurtic, a member of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, told AFP. Hurtic said digging at the 40-meter-long (130-foot) grave in a mountainous area known as Crni Vrh (Black Peak) near the Serbian border would continue for at least another two weeks.

The scientist who first identified the virus that causes AIDS said yesterday that five Bulgarian nurses and a doctor being tried in Libya did not infect hundreds of children with the virus, as charged. Luc Montagnier told Bulgaria’s state radio that infection with the HIV virus at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi started due to poor hygiene in 1997, before the Bulgarians were hired there, and continued after their arrest. “I think this tragedy was probably caused by some negligence,” he said. Montagnier spoke to the radio briefly after testifying at the Bulgarians’ trial at a court in Benghazi. (AP)

Montenegro’s failure to prosecute a major sex-trafficking case has posed a serious threat to the fight against the trade in human beings, a European official was quoted as saying yesterday. Helga Konrad, anti-trafficking chief for the Stability Pact, a Vienna-based rights group focused on the Balkans, told the Dan daily that the international community was deeply disappointed that authorities in Podgorica had decided to drop the case, which implicated senior officials. “This affair and the manner in which it has been conducted up until now seriously threatens the structures which are fighting against the traffic in human beings and their work in Montenegro,” she said. (AFP)

A Bosnian-Serb former mayor, who received the Hague war crimes tribunal’s first life sentence, plans to appeal, but so do prosecutors who want genocide added to his list of convictions, the court said yesterday. The UN court convicted Milomir Stakic in July of extermination, murder and persecution during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, but cleared him of genocide. “Both sides intend to appeal,” said Jim Landale, spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. (Reuters)