ISTANBUL (AFP) - Turkish police yesterday arrested 51 people in three demonstrations staged to protest a controversial high-security jail system, the Anatolia news agency reported. In the northeastern town of Samsun, a small group of demonstrators gathered outside the provincial headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) and 18 were arrested when they disobeyed police orders to disperse. In Istanbul, baton-wielding police used tear gas to scatter the crowd of around 50 protesters outside an apartment belonging to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arresting 10 people. In the southern town of Antakya, police arrested 23 people who had tried to march toward the local AK headquarters.

BELGRADE (AP) - A government minister of Serbia and Montenegro said yesterday he has signed extradition orders for a former Yugoslav army colonel and that Serbian police would decide when to hand over the war crimes suspect to the UN tribunal in the Netherlands. The minister in charge of war crimes, Rasim Ljajic, told The Associated Press he signed documents on Friday clearing the way for the handover of Veselin Sljivancanin, but that other formal steps must still be taken in the coming days before the extradition. “It is now for the Serbian police to decide on the most appropriate date,” Ljajic said.

Nearly 200 supporters of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic demanded his release from the UN war crimes tribunal on Saturday, marking the second anniversary of his extradition to face war crimes charges. They came on buses and trucks from France, Germany and Austria, carrying Serbian flags, and marched on the seaside prison near The Hague where Milosevic has been in custody since June 28, 2001. At the detention unit, they read out a letter of support over a megaphone demanding his release. Similar protests were held in Belgrade. (AP)

The interior ministers of Bulgaria and Turkey urged Iran on Saturday to work with them to fight the trafficking of drugs from Afghanistan to Europe. “We found that it would be useful if the three countries join efforts, particularly against drug trafficking,” Bulgarian Interior Minister Georgi Petkanov said after meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Abdulkadir Aksu. Bulgaria and Turkey lie on the so-called “Balkan drug route” which runs from Afghanistan across Iran and the Balkans to central and western Europe, Petkanov said. (AP)

Around 150 people gathered at a Jewish cemetery in Romania’s northeastern city of Yasi yesterday in memory of 10,000 Romanian Jews who were killed there in a vicious pogrom in June 1941. “Romania must bear its share of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust,” perpetrated under Romania’s wartime dictator, the pro-Nazi Marshal Ion Antonescu, said Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Cristian Niculescu. The ceremony comes barely two weeks after Bucharest claimed that Romania, which was allied with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, had not been involved in the World War II Holocaust against Jews. (AFP)