TUNCELI (Reuters) Two Turkish soldiers and five Kurdish guerrillas have been killed in the past two days in clashes in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey, a security official said yesterday. “The military anti-terrorist operation is going to widen to cover five provinces and will continue for a long time. Troops are being backed up by helicopter,” the official said. On Saturday, a governor’s office in the region said another soldier had died of injuries sustained in a rebel ambush earlier in the week. Turkey’s top general has urged the government to approve a military incursion into mainly Kurdish northern Iraq to help crush an estimated 4,000 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants hiding there.

BELGRADE (AP) Four Belgrade University students died of suffocation early yesterday while exploring a cave in central Serbia, police said. The four, in their early 20s, were found dead in the Ravanicka Cave, 120 kilometers (75 miles) southeast of Belgrade, after apparently straying into a deep, unexplored section of the cave full of methane gas, police said.

A Turkish prosecutor is investigating whether 54 Kurdish mayors broke the law by claiming last month that rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was being poisoned in his prison cell, the government-run Anatolia news agency reported on Saturday. Last month, mayors belonging to the Kurdish Democratic Society Party asked for an independent group of doctors to examine Ocalan to establish whether he was being poisoned. Turkish authorities said tests on Ocalan showed no signs that he was being poisoned and called the allegations “complete lies.” A prosecutor in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir was investigating whether the mayors’ statement amounted to propaganda on behalf of terror groups, Anatolia said. (AP)

The trial of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of slandering two Libyan police officers by saying they were tortured was adjourned yesterday until May 6. The final speeches for the defense will be heard then, and this will be followed by a verdict. Yesterday’s hearing was attended by the doctor, Ashraf Ahmad Juma, but not by the nurses. The six medics are on death row after being convicted of injecting Libyan children with the HIV-tainted blood. (AFP)