ANKARA (AFP) - A second earthquake in three days jolted eastern Turkey early yesterday, leaving 18 injured and causing material damage, local authorities said, quoted by the Anatolia news agency. The tremor, which measured 5.9 on the open-ended Richter scale, struck at 3.55 a.m. local time in Karliova, in Bingol province, which was shaken Saturday by a quake measuring 5.7 that injured 16 people, the agency said. Erkan Capar, a local official in Karliova, said the second quake cut off telephone lines in some isolated hamlets and farmers said they lost a number of animals. More than 400 houses in 24 villages were damaged in yesterday’s temblor, Anatolia said.

SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria said on Saturday that US forces had admitted they broke their rules of engagement last week when a unit fired on a Bulgarian patrol, killing a soldier. “The US side has established that US troops... did not put enough effort into identifying the objects moving on the road and, without warning shots, as regulated, opened fire,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. A US-led investigation showed the American soldiers were on high alert when they accidentally shot and killed Gurdi Gurdev on March 4, because insurgents had just attacked two other units nearby, it said. There was no immediate confirmation from the US military in Iraq that it had acknowledged its troops were at fault.

Talks between the Kosovo government and Serbia on the fate of people missing from the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict will take place in Belgrade tomorrow, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday. The first round of such talks were derailed a year ago following an outbreak of anti-Serb violence in the province which left 19 dead and thousands homeless. Of 3,192 people still listed as missing from the war, 2,460 are from Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, 529 are Serbs and 203 are from other ethnic backgrounds. (AFP)

A former Bosnian-Serb paramilitarist charged with the rape and torture of Muslim women during the 1992-95 Bosnian war surrendered to the UN war crimes tribunal yesterday to face trial. Gojko Jankovic, indicted by the Hague court for crimes against humanity and violation of the laws or customs of war, flew to the Netherlands from Bosnia’s Serb Republic, the second Bosnian Serb to do so from there in the last two months. Jankovic, who surrendered to authorities, departed amid heavy police security and was accompanied by the region’s Interior Minister Darko Matijasevic. (Reuters)