ISTANBUL (AFP) – Four Kurdish militants, including one woman, were sentenced to life in jail yesterday for a 1999 petrol bomb attack on an Istanbul shopping mall that killed 13 people, the Anatolia news agency reported. The court said the attack was part of a violent separatist campaign to carve out an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey. It also stripped the three men, who along with the woman had denied the charges, of any chance of parole. The attack on March 13, 1999, occurred amid a wave of Kurdish violence following the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya. The assailants hurled Molotov cocktails at the perfume department near the entrance of the mall, sparking a fire that blocked the only exit and quickly engulfed the six-story building in the Kadikoy district, on Istanbul’s Asian side. The victims either burnt to death or suffocated. The mall, packed with weekend shoppers, lacked a fire escape.

CONSTANTA (AP) – The second nuclear reactor at a plant in eastern Romania was switched on yesterday, and will be fully functioning by the end of September, officials said. Over the next few months, there will be a series of safety tests with the reactor, said Teodor Chirica, general manager of the National Nuclear Electric Company. The first reactor at the Cernavoda plant near the Danube River was turned on 10 years ago and provides about 10 percent of Romania’s electricity needs. The two reactors together will provide about 18 percent of the country’s electricity, Chirica said. The second reactor was built under a contract signed with the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and ANSALDO-Italia.

Troops from the European Union peacekeeping force (EUFOR) in Bosnia, backed by agents of Bosnia’s information agency, launched a dawn raid on the house of a Bosnian Serb, Vojislav Topalovic, suspected of helping top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic, EUFOR said in a statement yesterday. The operation was carried out at the request of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “A number of items were seized for further analysis and investigation...” the statement added. (Reuters)

The European Commission yesterday welcomed an investigation that led to the dismissal of two deputy ministers in Bulgaria’s center-left government, but said it hoped this was not just a one-off case. “The Commission welcomes the fact that the prime minister and the chief prosecutor’s office have conducted this in such an open and transparent way,” a spokesman said in Brussels. The two deputy ministers were dismissed on Saturday, while Economy Minister Rumen Ovcharov was also told to take leave. All three are implicated in Bulgaria’s first senior-level corruption probe. (AFP)