ANKARA (AP) - Four small bombs exploded in Turkish cities late Tuesday, slightly injuring a night watchman and causing damage to buildings, police and news reports said. Three of the bombs exploded near branches of the British-based HSBC bank in Istanbul, in the Aegean port city of Izmir — slightly injuring the bank’s watchman in the foot — and in the southern city of Adana, the Anatolia news agency reported. A fourth went off near a Turkish-American culture center in the capital, Ankara. The explosions appeared to have happened simultaneously in all four cities, at around 9.15 p.m. local time, private NTV television said. There were no immediate responsibility claims for the attacks.

PRISTINA (AP) - UN prosecutors have indicted six ethnic Albanians for the murder of a Serb and the beating of his elderly mother during Kosovo’s worst postwar outbreak of ethnic violence, a senior official said yesterday. In the first indictment filed for murder since the mid-March riots, three suspects were charged in the slaying of Slobodan Peric, 51, and five were accused of beating his 77-year-old mother, Anka, said Thomas Monaghan, head of the UN-run Justice Department in Kosovo. “This is one of the first of the serious cases from March,” he said. “There will be further indictments to follow.”

Bulgaria’s 480 soldiers in Iraq will be moved from Karbala, south of Baghdad, to Al-Divani, near the Shi‘ite holy city of Najaf in Kadisia province, Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolai Svinarov said yesterday. Bulgaria has accepted a proposal by the Polish command of the international force in southern Iraq to move the troops after having initially questioned the move, Svinarov said. (AFP)

Bosnia’s religious leaders have been lobbying on behalf of nationalist parties ahead of this weekend’s local elections, a human rights watchdog group said yesterday. Bosnian Muslim leaders, along with Roman Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, have “directed voters’ opinion toward the three main nationalist parties,” the local office of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Committee for Human Rights said. Religious leaders have used opportunities such as the opening of new houses of worship and celebrations of historical national events to stir up nationalist sentiment, the group said. (AP)