SARAJEVO (AFP) – Six workers have been injured in an explosion at a Bosnian steelworks majority-owned by Arcelor-Mittal, police said yesterday. The incident, which occurred late Thursday at the blast furnace of the plant in the central town of Zenica, left “six workers slightly injured,” police spokesman Senahid Hasic told national radio. A preliminary investigation showed the blast happened when “a large amount of melted steel” fell into a pool of water, he added. The blast furnace had been restarted less than three weeks ago after being dormant for 17 years, a step the steelworks described as “an important milestone in the resumption of the integrated route production.” The steelworks was closed at the begining of Bosnia’s devastating 1992-95 war. Arcelor-Mittal is the world’s biggest steelmaker. In 2004, the company bought a majority stake in the Zenica plant, which currently produces 220,000 tons of steel per year.

SARAJEVO (AP) – Several hundred women have protested a decision by a UN war crimes tribunal to refuse to add rape to the charges that two Bosnian Serbs are facing at a trial in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The women claim the defendants – Milan and Sredoje Lukic – organized rape camps for Serb soldiers and that Muslim women held there were treated as sex slaves during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. The women are members of the association known as Women Victims of War. The defendants, who are cousins, are on trial at the tribunal in the Netherlands for murder and other war crimes during the Bosnian conflict. The women who protested yesterday are angry at the tribunal’s decision July 8 to turn down a prosecution request to add rape charges to the indictment because it had been filed too late.

TUNCELI (Reuters) – Two Turkish soldiers and two Kurdish guerrillas were killed in clashes in southeast Turkey over the past 24 hours, security sources said yesterday. Two rebels and one soldier were killed in a clash in Bingol late on Thursday, which started after security forces encountered a group of separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members in the restive region east of the town of Tunceli. Another soldier was killed in a separate clash early yesterday in mountainous Sirnak, near the Iraqi border. The operations, backed by attack helicopters in Cudi mountains, where security forces detected some PKK militants, were continuing as well.

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has approved the early release of a Bosnian Serb convicted of murder and torture in the court’s landmark first trial, according to papers released yesterday. Dusko Tadic is eligible for release because he has served two-thirds of his 20-year sentence, according to an order signed by the tribunal’s president, Fausto Pocar. Tadic, 52, was convicted in July 1997 of persecution and cruel treatment of Bosnian Muslims after Serbs overran the northern Bosnia municipality of Prijedor in April 1992. Pocar approved Tadic’s release, despite testimony from German prison authorities, where he served most of his sentence, that he had shown no sign of remorse for his crimes. Tadic is expected to be deported to Serbia after being freed. (AP)

A key opposition figure in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has been released on bail a day after being arrested and charged in a corruption probe. Deputy leader Zoran Zaev and four aides were arrested Thursday on suspicion of embezzling $12.4 million worth of public funds during the construction of a shopping mall in the southern town of Strumica. His Social Democratic party walked out of parliament in protest, calling the detention a political move by FYROM’s conservative government. (AP)

Forensic experts say they have exhumed 66 Srebrenica massacre victims from a mass grave in eastern Bosnia. Murat Hurtic, the head of the forensic team, says the last bodies were taken out yesterday. The team exhumed two complete and 64 incomplete skeletons. An ID card found in the grave supports initial information that the bodies were of Muslim men from Srebrenica who were killed in the July 1995 massacre. (AP)