BELGRADE (Reuters) – The presiding judge in the trial of a group of hardliners for the murder of Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003 said yesterday she had received threats two weeks before a verdict is to be delivered. Judge Nata Mesarovic said the threats were made in a two-page letter, signed by the unknown Organization for Serbs’ Defense, and sent from Chicago which has a large Serb population. It said she and other “traitors” would “pay a high price.” “It said they would not kill me, but injure me in such way that I will be a freak for the rest of my life,” Mesarovic told Blic daily.

PRISTINA (Reuters) – The UN mediator on Kosovo has tipped Dutch diplomat Peter Feith to oversee the Serbian province’s potential first months as an independent state, local media reported yesterday. “He is the ideal person,” the Kosovo daily Zeri quoted envoy Martti Ahtisaari as saying. “He has NATO experience and EU experience.” The former Finnish president noted that Feith had already worked on peace pacts with ethnic Albanians in Serbia and FYROM in 2001 and led the EU mission monitoring a 2005 peace deal brokered by Ahtisaari in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

Serbian officials yesterday extradited to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) a woman suspected of organizing a record 445-million-euro ($61 million) cocaine shipment confiscated in January in this small Balkan country. Stanislava Cocorovska-Poletan was arrested on an international warrant in Belgrade four months ago. Under heavy security at the Tabanovce border crossing, black-masked Serbian special police officers handed over Cocorovska-Poletan to FYROM authorities. She faces drug smuggling charges for allegedly masterminding the shipment of 483 kilograms (1,065 pounds) of cocaine seized in a truck near FYROM’s border with Kosovo. (AFP)

A municipal council chairman in Bulgaria’s Black Sea resort of Nesebur has been shot dead in his car, the Interior Ministry announced yesterday. Dimitar Yankov, 55, was found dead in his Porsche on Wednesday around 9.40 p.m. in the southeastern city of Burgas, the ministry said in a statement. He was shot seven times. State BTA news agency reported that Yankov was also a major hotel owner in the Sunny Beach resort near Nesebur and was also reported to be associated with the notorious Nesebur drug baron Dimitar Zhelyazkov, nicknamed “The Eyes,” who is currently under arrest. (AFP)