ISTANBUL (AFP) – A veteran Turkish journalist, rounded up as part of a probe into a shadowy anti-government network, was released yesterday after a storm of criticism over his detention, the Anatolia news agency said. Ilhan Selcuk, 83, chief columnist of the secularist Cumhuriyet daily and a fierce critic of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government, was however banned from leaving Turkey until the probe is over, Anatolia quoted his lawyer Akin Atalay as saying. Selcuk was arrested in a pre-dawn operation Friday along with 11 other people. Four others were also released yesterday, Anatolia said. They were questioned as part of an investigation into a group of suspected ultranationalists who reportedly plotted unrest and political assassinations in Turkey.

BRUSSELS (AFP) – A Kurdish man, accused by Turkey of instigating attacks during the 1990s that killed 16 people, has been arrested in Belgium, its authorities said yesterday. A Turkish court had issued seven international arrest warrants against Mehmet Sahin, 33, who has been living in Belgium since 2000, the prosecutor in the Belgian city of Liege said. Sahin was arrested on Friday in Liege by the terrorism unit of the Belgian federal police as he was participating in a demonstration organized for the Kurdish New Year. He is being held in a detention center in the suburbs of Liege. According to Turkish authorities, Sahin has been implicated in attacks and confrontations between 1992 and 1997 with government forces in the region of Diyarbakir.

Inmates at a Bosnian prison barricaded themselves in overnight and demanded to speak to a justice minister about alleged corruption, state radio said Saturday. The action by some 70 inmates, who barricaded themselves in on the second floor of the prison building late Friday, was in protest against the privileged treatment of some inmates and corruption in the institution, the report said. They only agreed to end their protest at Tunjice Prison, near the main city of Banja Luka, after negotiations with representatives of Justice Minister Dzerard Selman. (AFP)