ISTANBUL (AFP) - Nine people were killed and 27 injured when a tanker crashed into 25 other vehicles in Turkey’s biggest city Istanbul, a local health official said. The pileup occurred in the Kartal district, on the Asian side of the city, when the driver lost control of the tanker, loaded with 30 tons of diesel, after its brakes failed. It smashed into 17 cars, two buses, three minibuses and three small trucks.

TIRANA (AP) - Patric Pascal, the French manager, and three Albanian employees of a French-owned bitumen mine were detained yesterday on suspicion of being responsible for a gas explosion that killed six miners, the prosecutor general’s office said. A methane gas explosion Monday at the Selenica bitumen mine near the southwestern port town of Vlore, 140 kilometers (85 miles) south of Tirana, killed the six miners and injured 17 others, nine of them seriously.

An Israeli security chief said yesterday the suicide bombers who struck at the British consulate and HSBC bank in Istanbul last November had originally planned to attack Israel’s consulate in the city. Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet internal security service, said the bombers changed their mind after “they saw the kind of security” in place at the Israeli consulate, some 200 meters from the scene of the blasts. (Reuters)

The European Commission issued a barely veiled warning to Romania yesterday to adopt new child protection laws to get its troubled EU membership bid back on track. “We have been saying for weeks now that the highest priority for Romania is to adopt comprehensive legislation on the protection of children,” said Jean-Christophe Filori, a commission spokesman for enlargement issues. “We’re not talking here about quotas of cotton or something. We’re talking about children. This is a matter of human rights,” he told reporters. (AFP)

An ultranationalist leader whose party won the most votes in Serbia’s December elections predicted yesterday that another early vote would have to be called by the end of the year. The deputy leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Tomislav Nikolic, told reporters that he expected the government of Prime Minister-designate Vojislav Kostunica to collapse soon after taking office. “That government will not be able to agree on anything,” Nikolic declared. (AP)