ANKARA (AFP) - The death toll from a road accident in central Turkey rose to 24 after rescue workers recovered five more bodies in the wreckage of the collision, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. No one survived the accident late Monday in which a fruit truck and a van carrying agricultural workers crashed head-on near Kangal town in the province of Sivas, the agency said. The cause of the collision was not immediately clear.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Water supplies to Turkey's capital Ankara, already disrupted by drought, were cut off late on Monday when a major pipe feeding the city of 4 million people burst, authorities said yesterday. Television showed residents wading through a flood in the district where the pipe burst - in contrast with the rest of the city, where a severe drought has reduced water levels in dams to just 4 percent of their capacity and forced city authorities to impose water rationing. Officials told a news conference it would take up to 36 hours to repair the pipe. «We hope this cut in the water supply will end quickly and we will get the water flowing again,» said Avni Kavlak, press spokesman for Ankara municipality.

Officials said yesterday they will publish the names of top Orthodox clerics who collaborated with Romania's former secret police, the Securitate, before the election of a new patriarch. «One of them will be the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and it would be a shame to discover later that he's a Securitate general,» said Mircea Dinescu, a board member of the Council for Studying the Securitate Archives. Patriarch Teoctist, who died on July 30 at the age of 92, will be replaced in the fall after a 40-day mourning period. The Church, which has resisted efforts in the past for the council to publish files regarding its priests, said it welcomed the review of clerics' files. (AP)

Bulgaria will resume Russian gas supplies to Greece by tomorrow morning after it repairs a pipeline leak which caused an explosion, state gas monopoly Bulgargaz said yesterday. Sofia halted the gas supplies early on Monday after the incident opened a 10-meter-wide rupture in the transit gas pipeline in the southwestern part of the Balkan country. «We are working to repair the pipeline. We are going to be ready within the legally binding term of 72 hours after supplies were halted,» said Dimitar Gogov of Bulgargaz. The pipeline transits between 200,000 to 250,000 cubic meters of gas hourly to Greece. (Reuters)