BEIJING (AP) – Montenegro stunned Croatia 7-6 in the quarterfinals yesterday, with Nikola Janovic, Aleksandar Ivovic and Vladimir Gojkovic scoring two goals apiece, sending the mustachioed Croatians home without a medal. Reigning world champion Croatia came to Beijing as the favorite to claim gold and looked every bit the part to open group play. The team cruised through its first three games but then had a shocking defeat to the United States. The loss cost them an automatic spot in the semifinals and left them with a tough match against Balkan counterpart Montenegro. Montenegro, which won the European championship last month, took a 3-0 lead in the first quarter and sent the Croatians into panic mode early. They never recovered. “It’s very, very difficult for us,” Croatian driver Maro Jokovic said. “We were expecting more. They were better. What can we say? In the crucial moments, when we had to score, we didn’t. At the beginning, they made the big gap, and it was hard to get equal with them.” Montenegro advanced to play two-time defending Olympic gold medalist Hungary in the semifinals Friday. The third Balkan country, Serbia, thumped Spain 9-5 and will play the USA in the other semifinal.

ANKARA (AP) – Turkey’s interior minister yesterday confirmed that 13 policemen were wounded in a suicide bombing this week. The minister, Besir Atalay, said that a man who was being pursued by police detonated the explosives at a checkpoint outside the southern city of Mersin on Tuesday, wounding the policemen – two of them seriously. Authorities were investigating who was behind the attack, but Mersin Governor Huseyin Aksoy blamed Kurdish rebels. There has been no claim of responsibility.

AMSTERDAM (AP) – Judges at the UN Yugoslav tribunal say a Bosnian Serb leader may meet with former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic while both are in jail. In a court order yesterday, judges said Momcilo Krajisnik should be allowed to meet with Karadzic as a prelude to summoning him as a last-minute witness in Krajisnik’s war crimes case. Krajisnik, the former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament, is serving a 27-year sentence for persecution, extermination and the murder of Muslims and Croats during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. His appeals hearing is set for today. He has argued that Karadzic has evidence that could help exonerate him.

A former Bosnian Croat soldier was sentenced late Tuesday to 18 years in jail after being found guilty at retrial for war crimes during the country’s 1992-95 war, national television reported. Nikola Andrun was found guilty of crimes committed in 1993 against Muslim civilian prisoners at a Bosnian Croat militia’s detention camp, the report said. Andrun served as deputy commander of the Bosnian Croat wartime prison camp Gabela, near Capljina, where scores of Muslims were tortured and killed. Last September, the appeals panel of Bosnia’s war crimes court annulled the previous 13-year jail sentence handed down in 2006 and ordered his retrial citing violations of criminal procedure. (AFP)

Two ministers from Serbia’s new reformist government yesterday visited the grave of Slobodan Milosevic to pay respects to the former president on his birthday, Tanjug news reported. Zarko Obradovic and Milutin Mrkonjic, the education and infrastructure ministers from Milosevic’s Socialist Party, laid a wreath on the tombstone of the late autocratic leader in his hometown of Pozarevac, east of Belgrade. “What is going on (in Serbia) nowadays is just a (result of) the good judgment of Slobodan Milosevic” and his “sincere” intentions, Tanjug quoted Obradovic as saying. The Socialists, hardline nationalists in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, joined forces with their former bitter rivals, the Democratic Party of President Boris Tadic, in a West-leaning coalition government on July 7. (AFP)