ZAGREB (Reuters) – The final voyage of a World War Two plane from Bosnia to the D-Day museum in France hit a snag when Croatian customs refused to let it enter the country saying it was “a weapon.” A group of French volunteers managed to have the Douglas C-47 transport plane dismantled and mounted on trucks near the Bosnian capital this week, after a long bureaucratic battle with Bosnian authorities. But the journey ended unceremoniously only a few hundred kilometers later, at the Bosanski Brod border crossing. “The customs officials did not want it to enter Croatia, because they think it is like a weapon,” Beatrice Guillaume, a member of the team of volunteers who organized the transport, told Reuters yesterday. “We are completely stuck at the moment, we cannot move. It’s really stupid, after all this work. We don’t know what to do.”

ZAGREB (AFP) – Croatian President Stipe Mesic began talks yesterday with parties scrambling to form a coalition government after inconclusive elections, his office said. “Mesic met in the morning with representatives of the Italian, Czech, Roma, Bosnian Muslim, Hungarian and Serb minorities,” his spokeswoman Danijela Barisic told AFP. The minorities hold eight seats in the 153-seat parliament – three for Serbs, and one for each other ethnic group. The ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) are searching for potential allies after failing to secure an outright majority in the assembly.

Serbia charged 14 people, mostly ethnic Serbs, yesterday over the killing of 70 civilians in a Croatian village early in the 1991-95 war, the war crimes prosecutor’s office said. The 14, who include former Yugoslav army soldiers, local militia members and paramilitaries, were charged with committing war crimes against the civilian population in the village of Lovas, near the town of Vukovar in eastern Croatia. “This is the first time that former army members are being prosecuted,” office spokesman Bruno Vekaric told Reuters. Seven of those charged are in custody and seven are free but report regularly to police. (Reuters)

Three miners have been killed in an accident at a Bulgarian lead and zinc mine, the social and Labor Ministry said yesterday. The miners most likely died as a result of air pollution in the privately held mine of Dzhurkovo, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) southeast of Sofia, late on Wednesday, the ministry said in a statement. (Reuters)