ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A bomb explosion on a busy pedestrian street on the outskirts of Istanbul wounded 31 people yesterday, police said, in the latest violence to strike Turkey in recent weeks. Istanbul’s police chief Celalettin Cerrah said two civilians were in critical condition and had been rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. He told reporters at the scene that two plainclothed policemen, patrolling the area, were also injured from broken glass. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The bomb had been placed in a garbage bin in front of shops, cafes and kiosks in the busiest part of the pedestrian street in the city’s Bakirkoy district.

ANKARA (AP) - A journalist shot in the head during clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish protesters two weeks ago has died, a hospital said Saturday, raising the death toll in the rioting and ensuing attacks to 17. Ilyas Aktas, 22, a journalist working for a left-wing newspaper, was shot March 30 in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir during the worst clashes in the region in decades. He was pronounced brain-dead earlier this month and died in Ankara’s Hacettepe Hospital on Friday, the hospital said.

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha yesterday called for the country’s prosecutor general to be fired, accusing him of links to organized crime. Members of Berisha’s Democratic Party have accused Theodhori Sollaku of favorable treatment of suspected organized crime members, as well as involvement in groups believed to smuggle weapons, drugs and people. Sollaku, who served as Berisha’s legal counsellor when he was president in 1992-1997, has rejected the allegations as “nasty slander,” and has said that in the past two years prosecutors had cracked down on 26 criminal groups. (AP)

A Serbian prisoner using needle, thread and safety pins stitched his lips and tongue together to avoid a scheduled court hearing in his robbery case, the Blic newspaper reported on Saturday. Zoran Raskovic, 27, in custody at Belgrade’s central prison, is one of six people charged with a 2003 bank heist in the central Serbian town of Mladenovac, when the group allegedly made away with 112,000 euros. A prison guard discovered Raskovic on Friday morning after he had apparently sewed his mouth together overnight. The needle and the safety pins were likely smuggled into the prison, Blic said. A prison surgeon was called in and removed the self-inflicted stitches, but Raskovic, who had lost some blood, was subsequently too weak to appear in court on Friday. (AP)