ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday he would not say whether he will run for president until April. His statement prolongs uncertainty over an issue that has unnerved financial markets and exposed deep political divisions in the European Union candidate nation. Applicants for the presidency have until April 15 to decide whether to run. “We won’t speak of this before April 15,” Erdogan told reporters attending the World Economic Forum in Istanbul.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Forensic experts exhumed the remains of 156 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in a mass grave found in an eastern Bosnian village, an official of a commission for missing persons said yesterday. Ninety complete and 66 incomplete bodies were found in a secondary mass grave in Snagovo, Murat Hurtic of the Muslim-Croat Federation’s commission for missing persons said. “We strongly believe that the victims in this grave were also Muslims who were killed in Srebrenica in July 1995,” he said.

One Turkish soldier and three militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have been killed in clashes in southeast Turkey, the regional governor’s office said yesterday. The soldier, a commando sergeant, died on Thursday when rebels opened fire on his unit in a remote mountainous part of Sirnak province, it said. A PKK rebel also died in the clash. The other two guerrillas were killed earlier on Thursday in the same region. (Reuters)

Bulgarian Defense Minister Veselin Bliznakov said yesterday his country was ready to boost its troop numbers in Afghanistan next spring. He told parliament the commitment would be relayed to Bulgaria’s partners in NATO at the transatlantic military alliance’s summit in Latvia next week. “We have to declare our political will to continue being part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),” Bliznakov told the assembly. (AFP)