STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Police investigating the fatal knifing of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh are pursuing a possible Balkan connection, the daily Aftonbladet said on Saturday. Mijailo Mijalovic, 24, who is helping police with their inquiries into the murder, was described in the report as a Serbian nationalist with a grudge against Lindh for having supporting the NATO bombing of Serbia during the 1996 Kosovo war. Aftonbladet cited a friend of Mijalovic, whom it did not identify, as the source of its information. “He was very much affected when Lindh said it was OK to bomb Serbia,” the friend was quoted as saying.

PRISTINA (AP) - Kosovo’s government said Saturday it will seek approval from the province’s Parliament before it participates in UN-planned talks bringing Belgrade authorities and Kosovo leaders together. Kosovo’s prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi, said the government would request that the 120-member Parliament decide on participation in the talks, which would be the first face-to-face meeting of representatives from Kosovo and Serbia since the 1999 war, in which Serb forces cracked down on separatist ethnic Albanians. The talks would tackle everyday issues and would not touch on the contentious issue of Kosovo’s final status.

The United Nations has approved $102 million in contracts that Turkish firms signed with neighboring Iraq under the oil-for-food program before the US-led war, State Minister Kursad Tuzmen said yesterday. “The amount of (authorized) contracts by our firms in the fields of agriculture, communications and transport, food, health, irrigation, electricity and oil had reached $636 million as of September 26,” Tuzmen, who holds the foreign trade portfolio, said in a written statement. (AFP)

Almost a quarter of Bosnians aged 15 to 30 want to permanently leave the Balkan country, which is still struggling to recover from the devastating 1990s war, an opinion poll showed Saturday. Twenty-four percent of 1,000 of those surveyed said they would like to leave Bosnia for good, according to the poll published in a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report. The report noted that the percentage of those who wanted to leave permanently was about the same for all ethnic groups, whether Croat, Muslim or Serb. (AFP)

Thousands of demonstrators shouted slogans and unfurled banners in Turkish cities on Saturday to demand an end to the US-led occupation of Iraq. The protests highlighted strong opposition in Turkey to the US mission as Turkey’s government considers sending its own troops to help the United States. In the capital Ankara, some 4,000 protesters attended a rally with concerts and celebrity speeches demanding an end to the US-led occupation of Iraq. (AP)

One Turkish soldier was killed in a firefight with Kurdish rebels in Turkey’s troubled southeast, security officials said yesterday. The clash between NATO member Turkey’s military and Kurdish militants, who ended a unilateral ceasefire on September 1, raged on in remote terrain on the mountainous border of Tunceli and Bingol provinces. (Reuters)