BANJA LUKA (AFP) - A mosque was attacked and slightly damaged by explosives in Bosnia yesterday, raising fears that ethnic violence in Kosovo could reignite hostilities between Serbs and Muslims here. “Two explosive devices were thrown at the mosque, breaking its windows and damaging the facade,” Mufti Edhem Camdzic told AFP after the attack in the northern Serb-run town of Gradiska. Bosnian-Serb police confirmed the attack but refused to elaborate, pending further investigations.

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey strongly condemned the Israeli army’s slaying of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin yesterday, saying such acts did not contribute to peace or security. The killing will “drag the region into an atmosphere of confrontation from which it will be even more difficult to emerge,” the Turkish government said in a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry. “It is also clear that the killings carried out by the Israeli army do not boost the country’s security,” the statement said. Bosnia said yesterday it regretted the killing and urged all sides to restrain from further violence. “(Bosnia) expresses regret over the assassination,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “(The killing) has significantly harmed the peace process in the region.”

Romania will carry out reforms demanded by the European Union even if pressures to curb them arise in elections this year in the former communist country, President Ion Iliescu said yesterday. “We will not back off from or fail to carry out what we have promised in order to join the European Union in 2007,” Iliescu told a seminar in Bucharest organized by the British weekly The Economist. He said Romania’s “crucial goal” was to complete its negotiations with the EU by the end of the year on acceding to the Union and, “I assure you that we are going to carry out reforms at a steady pace.” (AFP)

Police were investigating the violent deaths of a Turkish family of five whose bodies were found in a house in Augsburg, southern Germany, yesterday, a spokesman said. A man with a key to the house alerted police after he found five corpses in various rooms. “We have established so far that they met a violent death but are still investigating the cause of death and the background,” said police spokesman Manfred Gottschalk. (Reuters)

A Montenegrin newspaper editor who faces prosecution by the UN war crimes tribunal for revealing the identity of a protected witness in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic apologized yesterday. Dusko Jovanovic published the apology in his Dan newspaper, under a headline reading “I apologize.” Jovanovic said he feels “true remorse” over any damage he might have inflicted upon the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, or the witness whose identity he uncovered. The move was an apparent attempt by Jovanovic to avoid a contempt trial scheduled for May. There was no immediate comment from the tribunal to Jovanovic’s apology. (AP)

Belgrade police chief Milan Obradovic was sacked yesterday for mishandling a riot last week, in which a mosque was torched amid clashes between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, officials said. “The police in Belgrade, by all evidence, misjudged the situation and a certain amount of confusion prevailed at the start of the fire at the mosque,” Deputy Interior Minister Miroslav Milosevic said. (AFP)