THE HAGUE (AFP) - Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul will meet EU and Dutch ministers this month ahead of an EU summit that will decide whether to open membership talks with Ankara, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday. The meeting will take place on November 24 and involve EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, and other officials.

ANKARA (AFP) - Three suspected illegal immigrants were killed and 25 others, mostly Iraqis, were hurt late on Wednesday when their bus crashed through the barrier of a bridge and plunged into a stream in northwestern Turkey, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The three victims of the accident in the province of Tekirdag included two Iranians and an Iraqi, officials from the headquarters of the local paramilitary troops told Anatolia. Security forces were looking for four people who fled after the incident, the sources said, adding that 32 foreigners — 30 Iraqis and the two dead Iranians — were on the bus at the time of the crash.

Ljubisa Beara, a Bosnian-Serb former army officer accused of a key role in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, yesterday pleaded innocent to charges related to the murder of more than 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. Beara was accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the massacre, when he was security chief of the Bosnian-Serb army responsible for the transport of Muslim prisoners. Srebrenica was then under the protection of Dutch UN troops. According to the prosecution, Beara was arrested by Serbia and Montenegro authorities last October and turned over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a contradiction of Belgrade’s claim that he gave himself up voluntarily. (AFP)

Discrimination against Gypsies, or Roma, has increased in Bulgaria, isolating them in a vicious cycle of unemployment and illiteracy, according to a new report. “Bulgarian Roma are the least popular of all ethnic groups — 37 percent of the non-Roma in Bulgaria share an anti-Roma xenophobia and xenophobic attitudes towards Roma have increased for the last years,” the Bulgarian Agency for Social Analysis said in its report released late Wednesday. The report said the rise in discrimination was a backlash against attempts by government and private organizations to reduce prejudice against Gypsies. (AFP)

UN war crimes prosecutors yesterday questioned former ethnic Albanian rebel-turned-politician Ramush Haradinaj for a second time over his role in the 1998-99 Kosovo war. Officials from the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based at The Hague, made no comment but Haradinaj said after the questioning that his cooperation with the tribunal was “completed.” “"I have no other obligations toward the tribunal representatives and I will return to daily life,” the ex-guerrilla commander said. (AFP)