SARAJEVO (AP) - Authorities are monitoring up to 250 Arab Muslims who fought in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war on suspicion that they may have terrorist links, a top police official said yesterday as he pressed for indictments against five suspects arrested last year in an alleged plot to blow up a European embassy. Zlatko Miletic, director of police for the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia, told reporters that the Muslims under surveillance all live in or around the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca, where they settled after the war. Several thousand mujahedeen, or Islamic fighters, came to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim side against Serbs and Croats after Bosnia dissolved into ethnic conflict in the early 1990s.

PRISTINA (AP) - A senior World Health Organization official pleaded yesterday with some 125 Roma families to leave three lead-contaminated camps in northern Kosovo and move to a nearby cleaner facility. Marc Danzon, regional director of WHO for Europe, said the Roma are putting their lives and the futures of their children at risk. “It is in the interest of the people to move there... we need to do that as quickly as possible, respecting human rights and the right of choice,” Danzon said.

Kurdish protesters hurled bricks and stones at Turkish police yesterday in a second day of demonstrations to mark the anniversary of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan’s capture. Police wielding truncheons charged at a crowd holding an illegal protest in the southern city of Adana. In footage broadcast on CNN-Turk television, dozens of the protesters were seen climbing to the roof of a building housing the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party and showering police with bricks, stones and chairs. At least two police officials were injured. Police detained 200 of the protesters, reports said. (AP)

Romania’s leftist opposition filed a motion of no confidence against the ruling centrist government yesterday, protesting health reforms it says will hurt the poor in the Black Sea state. Romania’s government on Monday submitted a vast package of healthcare proposals, attaching a vote of confidence to fast-track the legislation as it gears up to join the EU in 2007. Analysts widely expect the government to survive the vote on Tuesday. (Reuters)

Croatia yesterday banned poultry imports from Austria, Germany and Hungary after the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus was found there, a spokesman said. The Agriculture Ministry “today banned poultry imports, including live birds and their meat from Germany, Austria and Hungary,” its spokesman Mladen Pavic told AFP. (AFP)