ISTANBUL (AP) - Turkey’s interior minister said yesterday that a central suspect in last month’s Istanbul suicide attacks fled Turkey to Syria shortly after the bombings. Turkey has asked Syria for help in extraditing suspects and Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu praised Damascus after it extradited 22 people last weekend. Aksu said key suspect Azad Ekinci left Turkey for Syria after the Nov. 15 suicide bombing. Aksu said Ekinci was believed to have directed those involved in the bombings “ideologically and psychologically” and helped buy two of the vehicles used in the attacks.

ANKARA (AFP) - The Turkish government, viewed with suspicion by the secular intelligentsia for its Islamist roots, came under fire yesterday for loosening rules regulating the holding of Koranic classes. The government’s new regulations allow students to attend evening classes rather than just classes held over the summer holiday. It also allows for such classes to be organized for a smaller number of pupils and for students to be allowed to stay together in boarding houses. “We urge the government to withdraw this circular. It is a blow to secular and scientific education,” Alaattin Dincer, the head of a leading teachers’ trade union, Egitim-Sen, told AFP. “We will lodge an application with courts for the cancellation of the regulation next week,” he said.

An international journalists’ rights group yesterday condemned an attack on a Romanian investigative reporter who suffered a broken jaw, saying it was concerned about increased violence toward Romania’s press. Ion Ardelean, a correspondent at the newspaper Evenimentul Zilei who specializes in investigating corruption, suffered head injuries and a broken jaw when he was attacked late Wednesday by unknown assailants in the town of Timisoara, hospital officials said. The Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Frontiers - RSF) said in a letter to Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, “The increase in violence against journalists investigating corruption among the political classes in power, especially in the provinces, is extremely worrying.” “The work of investigative journalists is fundamental to the fight against the corruption that is like a gangrene in Romania,” RSF said in its letter, a copy of which was received by AFP. (AFP)

Local elections in parts of the Albanian capital Tirana will be repeated Dec. 28, the election commission said yesterday. The elections, initially held in October, will be repeated in 130 of Tirana’s 346 polling stations because an election panel found irregularities. The panel investigated the issue at the request of the opposition Democratic Party, which had claimed the Socialists manipulated the election. (AP)

Bosnia and Serbia-Montenegro participated in NATO ministerial talks for the first time yesterday as the alliance confirmed plans to bring them into an outreach program for aspiring NATO members. (AP)