ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Police detained a Turkish Airlines employee yesterday after he released a woman he had been holding hostage with a gun at the company’s headquarters, a company spokeswoman told Reuters. Police, including special forces teams, had set up a security cordon around the area where the man had been holding a female employee of Turkish Airlines. The state-run Anatolia news agency said the man and the woman had been in a relationship and that he had carried out the hostage-taking after she left him and rejected his subsequent advances.

MOSCOW (AFP) – Tomislav Nikolic, a pro-Russian candidate in Serbia’s presidential election, arrived in Moscow yesterday ahead of a weekend runoff poll against incumbent Boris Tadic. Nikolic is due to meet leading members of the Russian parliament today, news agencies said, citing officials. “In all the 17 years that I have spent in Serbian politics, I have fought for a turn toward Russia,” ITAR-TASS quoted Nikolic as saying in an interview ahead of the trip. “My conviction has been strengthened by Russia’s principled position on the problem of Kosovo, the consistent defense of the norms of international law, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia.”

In 2007 Bulgarian customs officials seized 977 kilograms of heroin, almost double the previous year’s haul, the head of Bulgaria’s customs agency, Asen Asenov, said yesterday. The heroin seized was part of a total of 1,224 kilograms (2,698 pounds) of drugs in 2007, said Asenov. “The data mean that there was approximately one drug seizure every three days,” said Asenov, presenting the agency’s annual report. Margarita Eftimova, the head of the agency’s anti-drug trafficking unit, said the amount of heroin seized had nearly doubled from the 493 kilos seized in 2006 mainly because of increased production in Afghan-istan. (AFP)

Turkey earned 18.48 billion dollars (12.5 billion euros) from its tourism sector last year, a 9.7 percent increase from a loss-making year in 2006, the Turkish Statistics Institute said yesterday. A total of 27.2 million tourists – foreigners and Turks living abroad – visited Turkey last year, up 17.6 percent from the 2006 figure of 23.1 million tourists, it added. Turkey had a disastrous tourism season in 2006 as it was hit by a bird flu outbreak that killed four people and a string of bombings in the summer by separatist Kurdish rebels in which several foreigners were injured. (AFP)

Bulgaria has tightened security along its borders with a view to joining Europe’s open-borders Schengen zone in 2011, Interior Minister Rumen Petkov said yesterday. “This is a very ambitious date, but the preparatory measures we already started implementing in 2007 are yielding serious results,” Petkov told reporters. In a bid to stamp out corruption, border police were assigned to the different border checkpoints on a rotating basis and surveillance cameras were installed to monitor their work, the minister said. (AFP)