PRISTINA (AP) - UN police arrested a suspect yesterday in the ambush killing of an officer from India earlier this month. The unidentified 21-year-old Serb man was arrested in the village of Slatina in northern Kosovo, said UN police spokesman Derek Chappell. Satish Menon, 43, a UN policeman from India's southern state of Kerala, was shot to death while traveling in a UN police car near the village of Slatina, some 45 kilometers (30 miles) north of the capital, Pristina.

ZAGREB (AP) - A top government anti-narcotics official and two civil servants in Croatia were in custody yesterday on suspicion of embezzling state funds earmarked for the rehabilitation of drug addicts. Police identified the three as Ante Barbir, head of the government anti-narcotics office in Zagreb, and two others located in Split - Mario Puljiz, and Vedran Mardesic, both involved in battling drug abuse in the southern city. They were accused of embezzling about 385,000 kunas ($60,000) of state grants over the past three years.

Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party claimed yesterday that the UN war crimes tribunal has banned its members from visiting the former president at his prison cell in The Hague, the Netherlands. The Socialists described the move as a violation of Milosevic's human rights and said it was aimed at «completely isolating» him. There was no immediate comment from The Hague tribunal on the statement. (AP)

Forest fires continued to ravage southern Bosnia yesterday, where over 6,000 hectares of brush and forest have been destroyed since June, local authorities said. Firefighters near the southern town of Bileca struggled for the seventh consecutive day to contain a fire there that has so far destroyed over 2,700 hectares. Police yesterday said they had arrested someone on suspicion of starting fires near the southern town of Trebinje, where some 2,350 hectares of brush and forest have been destroyed by fire in recent weeks. (AFP)

A female photographer was banned from traveling on the same plane as the Romanian soccer team because of the side's superstitions, Gazeta Sporturilor, a Romanian newspaper, reported yesterday. Officials from the Romanian squad later confirmed that the newspaper's photographer, Gabriela Arsenie, who won an award for best sports photo of the year in 1999, had been barred from the flight. «No woman (has) traveled with the national team's plane so far, and that's why we did not allow the photographer to come with us,» said an official. (Reuters)