BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia-Montenegro’s defense minister said in comments published on Saturday that one of the most wanted war crimes fugitives — former Bosnian-Serb army commander Ratko Mladic — could surrender to the UN war crimes tribunal. “There is political will to solve the issue” of Mladic, Defense Minister Prvoslav Davinic was quoted as saying by daily newspaper Blic. “I would not rule out the possibility that he surrenders.” The Defense Ministry confirmed Davinic’s comments to The Associated Press. Davinic acknowledged that authorities face “problems” in their search for Mladic, but said “a little determination and coordination” is needed to close the case.

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey on Saturday stepped up its investigation of a deadly attack blamed on separatist Kurdish rebels, with the interior minister saying no suspect would be named until an examination of the explosives used in the car bombing had been completed. Both police and the target of the remote-controlled explosion, Van Governor Hikmet Tan, have blamed the attack on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). But Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu, in televised remarks in Van, said: “I am not yet in a position to say that this organization or this person was the perpetrator... I cannot say anything because we do not have definite evidence.”

Turkey is withdrawing the last of its military observers from northern Iraq, where they had been deployed since 1997 to oversee a ceasefire between two rival Kurdish factions, a government official said yesterday. There is no reduction, however, in the several thousand Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq, who have been hunting Turkish Kurd rebels in the mountains for years, the official said. The Turkish military observers were sent to northern Iraq to supervise a British- and US-backed truce between the region’s two main Kurdish factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party. (AP)

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul gave his backing on Saturday to the transitional government in insurgency plagued Iraq, after meeting with senior Lebanese officials in Beirut. “Our points of view on Iraq are altogether convergent. We support the transitional period necessary to install constitutional institutions and lead to full sovereignty in Iraq,” Gul told a news conference with his Lebanese counterpart Jean Obeid. “Our meetings focused mainly on the need for a unified democratic Iraq with good relations with its neighbors,” Obeid said. (AFP)