DIYARBAKIR - A man was crushed to death yesterday and dozens wounded in a Turkish police crackdown on Kurds celebrating their traditional New Year. The Anatolia news agency reported scattered incidents across the country and said more than 500 people were arrested, although the day’s festivities went off calmly in many areas. Officials warned the Kurdish minority not to use the day, which in the past has seen deadly clashes between troops and Kurdish separatist sympathizers, for political ends. Local officials said 34-year-old Mehmet Sen died in the city of Mersin after being crushed against a wall by a police vehicle moving in on a riot that erupted when revelers refused to disperse. (AFP)

ZAGREB - Croatian forensic teams have found the remains of 14 people in a newly discovered mass grave believed to hold Croatian victims of the 1991-95 Serbo-Croatian war, the HINA news agency reported yesterday. The remains of four people have been exhumed from the grave and recovery work is continuing, Ivan Grujic, the head of the Croatian commission for missing persons, said. The grave was found in a cemetery in the village of Bogdanovci, near the eastern town of Vukovar, scene of one of the worst massacres of the war. (AFP)

A former Turkish prisoner died yesterday after a 231-day hunger strike in protest at Turkey’s maximum-security prison system, becoming the 49th person to die in the more than a year of hunger strikes, a human rights group said. Tuncay Yildirim, 30, died in the Aegean city of Izmir, the Human Rights Association said. He had been imprisoned because of membership in a banned radical leftist group, but was released in February due to his deteriorating health. Yildirim was the seventh person to starve to death in the protest this year. (AP)

Ghosts, including that of the late communist leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito, are stalking a Yugoslav apartment block built on an old military graveyard, residents complained yesterday. Construction workers dug up the bodies of WWI Serb soldiers in 1990 to lay foundations for the army accommodation building in the southern city of Nis. Now tenants say they are being haunted by mysterious footsteps on the roof and weird noises in the night. “Tito’s image appears on the wall of our bedroom whenever rain falls on the cemetery,” a tenant said referring to a nearby cemetery. (Reuters)

The ultranationalistic mayor of Cluj, Romania, has called on the government to redo a national census for ethnic Hungarians here, claiming it is being rigged to increase the size of the ethnic Hungarian minority, a newspaper reported yesterday. Gheorghe Funar, known for his antipathy toward the Hungarian community in his town, said many Gypsies living in Cluj had declared themselves to be ethnic Hungarians, artificially swelling the numbers, the Adevarul daily reported. (AP)