BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s organized crime prosecutor yesterday filed criminal charges against 35 people - including judges, lawyers, bankers and businessmen - in what officials have called the country’s largest-ever anti-corruption investigation. The 35, including former president of Serbia’s Trade Court, were charged with criminal conspiracy, abuse of power and giving and taking bribes, the prosecutors’ spokesman Tomo Zoric said. “This is the biggest indictment in the history of Serbian judiciary,” he said.

STRASBOURG (AFP) - The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg yesterday found Bulgaria guilty of inhuman treatment of a national who contracted tuberculosis in prison. Stiliyan Atanasov Staykov, a 38-year-old resident of Shumen in Bulgaria, was found guilty in 1991 for murder, but acquitted in April 2005. The Strasbourg judgment stated that “in 1998 the applicant fell ill with tuberculosis, which was apparently endemic to the Bulgarian prison system at that time.” The European Council’s European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) also found that “the prison authorities’ efforts to contain the disease were inadequate.”

Bosnian authorities are investigating rape allegations against retired Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded UN peacekeepers in Bosnia at the start of the 1992-95 war, an official said yesterday. “We have the testimonies of women that he visited the detention camp several times and was not only witnessing, but also participating, in rapes there,” Sarajevo county prosecutor Oleg Cavka told AFP. He was referring to the detention camp called “Sonja” in the Sarajevo suburb of Vogosca where Bosnian-Serb forces forcibly imprisoned non-Serb women, notably Muslims, and forced them to be their sex slaves. (AFP)

Bulgarian Agriculture Minister Nihat Kabil announced yesterday measures to prevent the spread of swine fever to pig farms by vaccinating wild pigs which are the main carriers of the disease. “The measure is undertaken in line with a decision of the European Commission for vaccinating wild pigs in Bulgaria against the spread of swine fever,” the ministry said in a statement. Veterinary health authorities have reported this year three swine fever outbreaks in farms in southeastern Bulgaria and slaughtered over 200 animals to contain a further spread. (AFP)