ANKARA (AFP) - Police in eastern Turkey have detained 19 people, including a former mayor, on suspicion of aiding and abetting armed Kurdish rebels, police said in a statement yesterday. The arrests were made in the province of Tunceli after a militant from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) mentioned names in his testimony, according to the statement, carried by the Anatolia news agency. Among those detained was a former mayor of Tunceli, Hasan Korkmaz, and the head of the province’s chamber of commerce and industry, Ali Asker Guler.

BELGRADE (AFP) - Serbian President Boris Tadic yesterday blasted the UN’s chief in Kosovo after he threatened to cut ethnic Serbs out of discussions on the province’s future if they boycott elections next month. “This declaration is not encouraging for Serbs to decide to participate in the election in Kosovo... It is contrary to the principles of multiethnicity,” Tadic said in a statement sent to AFP. The chief of the UN mission in Kosovo, Soeren Jessen-Petersen, on Tuesday urged ethnic Serbs to vote in general elections scheduled next month, saying failure to do so would disqualify them from talks on Kosovo’s future.

Two witnesses testifying at the trial of the suspected killers of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic yesterday told a court in Belgrade that they had seen “armed men” coming out of the building where the prosecution alleged the murder had been committed. Milenija Nikolic, who was working as a cleaner in the building, was the first witness so far to confirm seeing the armed men on the premises.“I heard two shots, and then some uproar in the building. I came out of the kitchen and saw three people running down the stairs and out of the building,” Nikolic told the court. (AFP)

A Kurdish rebel was killed when a bomb he was trying to plant on a railway line detonated prematurely, police said yesterday. The bomb went off late Wednesday near tracks linking Turkey’s southeastern towns of Dortyol and Payas in the Hatay province, the Anatolia news agency reported. Police in Hatay, which borders Syria, confirmed the news report but refused to provide any additional details. (AP)

NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia said yesterday they had released a Serb who was detained last week for questioning about his suspected links to alleged war criminals. Veljko Borovina was released on Wednesday, the NATO-led Stabilization Force said in a statement, after having been arrested in the eastern town of Sokolac on August 31. Another man detained with Borovina, Milovan Bjelica, remained in detention, the statement added. Bjelica, a powerful businessman and former mayor of the Serb town of Pale, is widely seen as a supporter of the Balkans’ most wanted war crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic. (AFP)