BELGRADE (AP) – A court yesterday convicted Slobodan Milosevic’s militia commander and six of his henchmen of attempting to kill the current Serbian foreign minister and of murdering four of his associates. Milorad Lukovic, head of the elite paramilitary unit set up by Milosevic during the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for organizing the October 1999 attack on Vuk Draskovic, a prominent opposition figure at the time and now Serbia’s foreign minister. Milosevic’s secret service chief, Rade Markovic, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Five other members of Lukovic’s paramilitary group, known as the Red Berets, were each sentenced to between 14 and 15 years in jail. Relatives of the victims said the sentences were too lenient.

SARAJEVO (AFP) – The leaders of Bosnia’s main political parties began talks yesterday on stalled police reforms amid Serb opposition to seeing their police force disappear. The EU has made rapprochement talks with Bosnia conditional on the unification of its police forces in the country’s two entities, the Serbs’ Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Federation. Yesterday’s meeting was attended by leaders of 12 political parties and Vincenzo Coppola, the chief of the EU police mission in the former Yugoslav republic. At a meeting on Thursday, Bosnian-Serb politicians had said they would not give up control of the police in Republika Srpska. “We maintain that the RS police force should exist within the police of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Bosnian-Serb President Milan Jelic.

A tiny Serbian hamlet on the border with Romania launched an initiative yesterday to build a monument to Johnny Weissmuller, the late actor famed for his role as “Tarzan,” a report said. Weissmuller, a five-time Olympic swimming gold-medalist, was born in 1904 in the village of Medja, in the Banat region that straddles the two countries but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He died in 1984. The inhabitants of the hamlet were inspired by the decision earlier this week by another Serbian village to erect a statue of Sylvester Stallone’s famous film character, boxer Rocky Balboa, in a bid to rid itself of bad luck. (AFP)

Authorities seized 33.5 kilograms (740 pounds) of heroin on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s border with Bulgaria and arrested two suspected smugglers, police said yesterday. The drugs, with an estimated street value of –400,000 ($525,000), were found in a Turkish truck carrying electric equipment at the Deve Bair border crossing. (AP)