DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group has beheaded a Turkish driver it was holding hostage, according to a video posted on the group’s website yesterday. The Army of Ansar al-Sunna said in a statement it had killed the driver because he worked with the US-led forces in Iraq. “We warn all those who cooperate with the occupying Crusaders to repent and return to the faith or else blame only themselves for their fate, which is death,” one of four masked gunmen said, before decapitating the hostage with a knife.

ANKARA (AFP) - Rioting inmates at a jail in western Turkey tortured seven fellow prisoners they accused of raping underage convicts, broke windows and set fire to their wards before surrendering to negotiators yesterday, CNN-Turk television reported. Local lawyers negotiated an end to the protest, which lasted for about 12 hours, without the intervention of security forces poised outside the jail in Buca, near the western port of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city. “The riot is over. The prison’s administrators will enter the complex soon,” negotiator Hamit Yildirim told reporters outside the facility.

Eleven people died and 31 were seriously injured yesterday when a bus full of Kosovo Albanian students plunged off a cliff in northern Albania, a senior official said. Albanian Health Minister Leonard Sonis said the accident occurred near the border between Albania and the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, some 170 kilometers north of Tirana. Several government helicopters had been sent to the crash site to help evacuate the wounded. (AFP)

A Turkish prosecutor yesterday demanded the imprisonment of a contractor accused of causing the deaths of 195 people who perished when substandard buildings collapsed during a massive earthquake. Expert reports said Veli Gocer used shoddy building practices — such as mixing sea sand and pebbles with concrete — in apartments that crumbled when the quake hit in August 1999, killing 17,000 people in northwestern Turkey, the Anatolia news agency said. (AP)

The remains of 586 people, including victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, have been found in three mass graves in eastern Bosnia, an official said yesterday. “The three sites, all located in the village of Bljeceva in eastern Bosnia, are secondary mass graves as the bodies were initially buried somewhere else and then moved there,” Commission for Missing People member Murat Hurtic said. (AFP)