ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey’s top court yesterday lashed out at the Islamist-rooted government for meddling in judicial affairs in a blazing row over the expulsion of a veiled woman from a courtroom. A judge at a court of appeals last week ordered a defendant out of the courtroom when she refused to take off her Islamic-style headscarf during a hearing into a corruption case. The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed the incident as a violation of the right to defense and judicial discrimination against women wearing the Islamic headcover. The court of appeals hit back, charging that the criticism amounted to “interference in judicial affairs, which can never be accepted.” “Everyone can one day need independent justice. Virtue lies in accepting it before one needs it,” a board of the court’s senior judges said in a statement.

ISTANBUL (AP) - Paramilitary police said yesterday that two Turks who were accused of killing two German tourists and a Turkish national confessed to the crime, saying they committed murder to rob the tourists. The suspects, identified by the Hurriyet newspaper as Kudret Kaptan and Gundogan Tansel, were detained on Monday. They were expected to be formally charged with murdering the German tourists, 43-year-old Sebine Bader and 34-year-old Anja Hoefken, along with a Turk, paramilitary police said.

A 135-year-old library was razed by fire on the southern Croatian island of Hvar, officials said yesterday. All of the library’s 10,000 books disappeared in the flames in just four hours on Monday afternoon, said Mario Gamulin, the mayor of Jelsa, Hvar’s second largest city. He said an investigation was under way to determine the cause of the fire. (AP)

NATO-led peacekeepers yesterday launched an operation to destroy large quantities of weapons and ammunition belonging to the Bosnian-Serb Republic’s army, a spokesman for the force said. “Something in the order of 1,000 metric tons needs to be destroyed as soon as possible,” Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Tod told a news conference, adding that about 5,000 surface-to-air missiles would be destroyed in total. (Reuters)