SOFIA (AP) – Police in Bulgaria broke up an international smuggling gang, seizing 700,000 packs of contraband cigarettes worth an estimated $2.6 million, officials said yesterday. Police arrested 25 suspects, including three Turks and two Bulgarian border policemen on Sunday near a small village on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. “The contraband channel has been under surveillance for a month,” said Maver Dikov of the unit for fighting organized crime.

ZAGREB (AFP) – An education center on the atrocities committed by Croatia’s pro-Nazi WWII regime was opened yesterday at the site of a former concentration camp known as the country’s Auschwitz. “The Jasenovac camp is a horrible testimony to crimes committed by the Ustasha” regime, Parliament Speaker Vladimir Seks said at the opening ceremony, broadcast live on national television. “They killed Jews only because they were Jews, Serbs only because they were Serbs, Roma only because they were Roma and Croatians only because they were anti-fascists and opposed the regime,” he said. “This center will have an educational role. It guarantees that the truth, no matter how horrible, will not be neglected, denied and forgotten,” he added.

An aspiring Bulgarian pop singer has filed a claim to change her first name to Madonna, a court official told AFP yesterday. Lora, 20, appeared before the municipal court in northern Ruse on Friday claiming she is better known among friends and fans by her stage-name Madonna, the court chairman said by telephone. In 2002, a Manchester United fan, Marin Zdravkov, from the northern town of Svishtov changed his given name to Manchester. But it took the 38-year-old construction worker years of renewed court battles to win permission to change his family name from Zdravkov to United. (AFP)

The Turk who attempted to kill the late Pope John Paul II has called his successor, Benedict XVI, a “Nazi remnant” and decried his policies “of grudge and hatred” against Muslims, his lawyer said yesterday. Mehmet Ali Agca believes the head of the Roman Catholic Church is seeking to polarize the world along religious lines but is confident that “this Nazi remnant will fail in his policies of grudge and hatred,” attorney Mustafa Demirbag told reporters a day before Benedict XVI was to arrive for a four-day visit. (AFP)