DIYARBAKIR (AFP) - Police yesterday used tear gas and fired into the air to stop an enraged crowd from attacking five men suspected of raping a Swiss tourist in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, officials and witnesses said. The woman and her boyfriend, also Swiss, were attacked last Wednesday as they were camping outside the town of Muradiye, in the province of Van which borders Iran.

SOFIA (AFP) - Bulgaria’s economy and energy minister announced yesterday plans to partially dismantle equipment at two mothballed reactors at its nuclear power plant at Kozloduy as a guarantee to the EU that it will not attempt to reopen the facilities. The measure comes in response to a recent letter by European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn calling for the ministry to further demonstrate its commitment to the closure of the two reactors, and the forthcoming shutdown of two more by end-2006.

One person was killed and two others injured yesterday in a munitions explosion at a military base in northwest Turkey, reports and officials said. The explosion occurred at a base in Sakarya province, CNN-Turk television said. Governor Nuri Okutan said one person was killed and two others injured in the explosion, the cause of which was not immediately clear. (AP)

More than 100 Turks, most of them truckdrivers, have been killed in attacks on their vehicles or after being kidnapped by insurgents since the start of war in neighboring Iraq, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in a statement yesterday. Gul, responding to a question by an opposition lawmaker on the issue, said kidnappers so far have released 59 of the 86 Turkish hostages taken. (AP)

The top UN police official in Kosovo said yesterday that authorities were questioning two people over last week’s slaying of a Serb youth and denied the killing was ethnically motivated. The investigation of the shooting of Milan Veskovic “has thus far not revealed an interethnic connection,” UN Police Commissioner Kai Vittrup said. (AP)