ANKARA (Reuters) - Employers of a Turkish truck driver taken hostage in Iraq have agreed to pull out of the country following a threat by his captors to behead him, the state Anatolia news agency said yesterday. Dubai-based Al Arabiya television broadcast on Saturday a videotape it had received showing a gray-bearded man (photo) sitting in front of a banner stating “the Islamic Resistance Movement, Nu’man Brigades.” His abductors threatened to behead the man, identified by Turkish media as Mithat Civi, if his transport company did not agree to quit Iraq within two days.

BELGRADE (AP) - Leaders of the two officially united but estranged Balkan republics of Serbia and Montenegro yesterday welcomed a European decision to deal separately with them in preparing them for EU membership. “That was a positive development. It will defuse tensions between (the Serbian capital) Belgrade and (the Montenegrin capital) Podgorica,” Serbia’s deputy prime minister, Miroljub Labus, said. Parting with earlier policy, an EU foreign ministers meeting in the Netherlands on Saturday announced they’ll opt for to a “twin-track” approach.

The trial of 13 men accused of plotting the assassination of reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic last year resumes in Belgrade today in a special high-security court for organized crime. (AFP)

A nine-year-old Turkish girl whose mother had been forced by hostage takers to leave her in the school they took over in Beslan, southern Russia, died in the tragedy, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said yesterday. “We have learnt with deep regret that a Turkish citizen, Alana Dogan, lost her life in the hostage-taking,” the ministry said in a statement. (AFP)

Croatia said on Saturday it would open an investigation into the case of a former FYROM minister accused of ordering the murder of seven Asians in a plot to please the West, local media reported. Ex-Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski was arrested last Tuesday in his house on the northern Adriatic’s Istrian peninsula after Skopje had officially requested that Zagreb prosecute its former senior official. (Reuters)