SARAJEVO (AFP) – Bosnian prosecutors said yesterday they were investigating a former prime minister over the alleged illegal handover of suspected terrorists who ended up at the US military prison in Guantanamo. Zlatko Lagumdzija was being investigated along with Tomislav Limov, a former deputy interior minister in Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat entity, on suspicion of the “illegal deprivation of liberty” and rights, the prosecution said in a statement. The pair authorized the handover to the United States of four Bosnian citizens of Algerian origin in January 2002, despite several local court rulings against their deportation, the prosecutors said. Among them was Boumediene Lakhdar, one of the Guantanamo prisoners who won the right earlier this month to challenge their detention in US civilian courts. The three others were named as Hadz Boudellaa, Mohamed Nechle and Saber Lahmar. The four men were among six arrested in October 2001 on suspicion of planning an attack against the US and British embassies in Sarajevo, but were acquitted three months later by the Bosnian Supreme Court. However, the next day they were transferred to Guantanamo, the remote US military prison in southeastern Cuba, where they remain in detention.

STRASBOURG (AP) – A European human rights watchdog said yesterday it would investigate claims that ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo killed Serbs and sold their organs at the end of the war in Kosovo. The Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly is sending Swiss Senator Dick Marty to Kosovo to draft a report on the accusations, which first appeared in a book by former UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. Del Ponte wrote that she had been told by “credible journalists” of an organ-trafficking scheme. Albanian Foreign Minister Lulzim Basha has called the allegations “inventions and absurdities.” But the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly – a group of 315 European parliamentarians meeting in Strasbourg – said it did not have “any grounds to doubt the competency and awareness of the former prosecutor of the Hague tribunal on this matter.” It said that the claims must be thoroughly investigated and that, if true, “such monstrous crimes deserve the strongest condemnation on behalf of the European peoples.”

Some 4,000 industrial workers in Bosnia demanded higher wages and a better social safety net in a protest yesterday outside the government building in Sarajevo. Carrying banners that read “We want to be able to live from our work,” they pressed the government of Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat entity to increase wages, protect workers laid off following the privatization of state enterprises and the payment of delayed salary contributions. The average monthly salary for industrial workers in Bosnia is 250 euros ($390), while the unemployment rate is around 40 percent. (AFP)

NATO is looking to have trained and launched a 2,500-strong Kosovo security force by the end of next year, an alliance spokesman said yesterday. The force will be lightly armed and initially take on tasks such as crisis response, civil protection and ordnance disposal. “The first phase of the standing-up of the Kosovo Security Force (KSF) should be completed toward the end of 2009. Then we’ll see a few years later when it becomes fully operational,” NATO spokesman James Appathurai told a news briefing. “It is envisioned to be multiethnic. There will be slots for all communities,” he added of a locally recruited force due to cover overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian Kosovo, including its Serb enclaves. (Reuters)

Some 500 inmates at Kosovo’s biggest jail ended a hunger strike after authorities promised they would push through an amnesty law, the government said yesterday. “The hunger strike ended after the visit to Dubrava Prison by (Justice) Minister Nekibe Kelmedni,” ministry spokeswoman Liridona Kozmaqi said. “The minister informed them that the draft law was already prepared by the ministry and was submitted to the government for quick adoption and passage by the parliament.” The detainees of Dubrava Prison, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of the capital Pristina, began their hunger strike last weekend demanding guarantees of the new law. (AFP)