ISTANBUL (AFP) – An unidentified gunman fired a shot into the air outside an Armenian church in Istanbul yesterday shortly after a ceremony for a slain Turkish-Armenian journalist, a church official said. The gunman and another person fled on foot from the courtyard of the church in Kumkapi district where a ceremony had been held for the murdered Hrant Dink, the official told journalists. “We chased them down the street but were unable to catch them,” he said. The ceremony at the church on the European side of Istanbul was to mark the 40th day since Dink, the 52-year-old ethnic Armenian editor of the bilingual Agos weekly, was shot dead outside his office.

BERLIN (AFP) – Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the UN war crimes court, has asked Chancellor Angela Merkel to press Serbia over war crimes suspects Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, a German magazine has reported. Del Ponte told the new edition of Focus magazine appearing today that she had written to Merkel about the matter. She had asked that Germany, as president of the European Union, made sure the bloc did not resume talks with Belgrade about closer ties until the suspects were arrested and handed over, she said. “It is the task of the EU to keep up the pressure. The suspension of talks with Serbia toward accession must not be lifted until Mladic, Karadzic and other suspects are in The Hague,” she said.

Protesters threw firebombs at three buses in Istanbul on Saturday, incinerating one of them and injuring a driver, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. The private Dogan news agency said a group of about 50 protesters shouted slogans in favor of the banned Kurdish rebel group, the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, as the buses burned. Two of the buses were attacked as they were moving, and the other one was stopped on the road and its passengers forced to exit before it was attacked with Molotov cocktails, Anatolia said. (AP)

Several thousand supporters of the ultra-nationalist Ataka party rallied in Sofia on Saturday to protest at the inclusion of a Turkish minority party in the country’s coalition government. The protesters, waving Bulgarian flags, chanted anti-government slogans and carried placards reading “Down with the Turkish mafia leadership!” Bulgaria’s Socialist-led center-left government includes the Turkish minority Movement for Rights and Freedoms Party (MRF) alongside the centrist National Movement Simeon II party. The MRF has three ministers in the cabinet and represents the Turkish community in Bulgaria which makes up 10 percent of the population. The Turks’ five-century rule of Bulgaria was brutal, a history which angers Bulgarians. (AFP)