ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey’s top appeals court yesterday upheld a jail sentence of four years and two months for a policeman convicted of involvement in torturing to death a labor unionist, a ruling that a lawyer for the victim’s family denounced as too lenient. A lower court first jailed the officer for 10 years, but then reduced the sentence on grounds that it was impossible to determine which of the three policemen charged with torturing Suleyman Yeter had caused his death. Yeter died in police custody in Istanbul in March 1999, his neck fractured, hemorrhaging and his body covered in bruises. An official inquiry found that the unionist, who had been detained as part of an operation against a far-left underground group, had been tortured to death.

ISTANBUL (AFP) - At least nine illegal immigrants drowned when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea off Izmir province in southwestern Turkey, the Anatolia news agency said yesterday, citing local sources. A local official quoted by the agency said 20 people were apparently on board. Nine bodies washed up on shore while four survivors, including a Turk, managed to swim to the coast. “We are questioning these people,” the official was quoted as saying, without specifying where the boat people came from or where they were heading, though he speculated that the craft had set out from a nearby port. He said the coast guard was searching for other victims.

A Turkish truckdriver was killed and his vehicle set alight yesterday by unidentified gunmen in northern Iraq, the fourth such killing in as many days, regional police said. “The Turkish driver was killed near Jebel Makhul (some 200 kilometers [120 miles] north of Baghdad) by armed men who set fire to his truck,” said Colonel Mohammed Hussein, a police spokesman in Salaheddin province. (AFP)

Two Romanian journalists have been threatened by politicians from the ruling ex-communist party, in the latest incident against media freedom shortly ahead of November 28 polls, a local media rights group said yesterday. The media-monitoring agency MMA said in a statement that members of the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD) in the central Vrancea county issued daily threats to punish journalists Sebastian Oancea and Gabriel Sava of the Ziarul de Vrancea while they were covering an election campaign event. (Reuters)

A Turkish Islamist human rights group said yesterday that it was sending a truckload of baby food to the Iraqi rebel bastion of Falluja, which is facing a US assault. “A US strike on Iraq is a strike on Istanbul, Ankara,” said Bulent Yildirim, president of the Association of Rights and Freedom (IHH). IHH, which is shipping 40,000 baby meals as well as clothes to Falluja, also planned other aid convoys to ferry “medicines, food and doctors,” Yildirim said. (AFP)