ANKARA (AFP) - At least 12 people are known to have died when a boat carrying would-be immigrants sank off Turkey’s west coast while trying to reach neighboring Greece, authorities said yesterday. Two more bodies have been found since the sinking on Wednesday, and authorities warned the death toll may yet rise. Coast guards say around 36 people were on board the ill-fated vessel, which sank near the popular Turkish resort of Cesme. According to the eight survivors — Palestinians and Mauritanians — the people smugglers and crew fled in an inflatable boat leaving their human cargo to their fate.

ANKARA (AFP) - A man has been sentenced to a record 22 years in jail for repeatedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founding father, whose reputation is strictly protected by law, Turkish press reported yesterday. Murat Vural, aged 30, was jailed for five acts of vandalism this year in which he spray-painted busts of Ataturk in schools in Ankara’s Sincan suburb, the high-circulation Hurriyet reported.

A Turk suspected of having been one of the leaders in Europe of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) went on trial in Frankfurt yesterday on charges of “belonging to a criminal organization.” The 48-year-old man, identified only as Hasan A., was arrested at Frankfurt international airport on February 3. According to the charge sheet, he belonged to the PKK leadership in Europe from April 1999 to June 2001, operating under the code name “Ferhan.” (AFP)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit Kosovo next week, a ministry spokesman said yesterday, ahead of UN-backed negotiations this month on the future status of the breakaway province. Lavrov will travel on Sunday and Monday to Serbia and Montenegro and “a trip to Kosovo is planned” during that visit, ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin was quoted as saying by the ITAR-TASS news agency. (AFP)

Turkish authorities have not allowed lawyers for jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan to visit him for several weeks, his defense team said yesterday. “For weeks we have not been able to visit our client,” said Aysel Tugluk. Ocalan, who heads the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), is serving a life sentence on the northwestern island of Imrali for “separatism” and “treason.” (AFP)