EASTERN EUROPE

CHECHEN OFFICIAL: FORCES KILLED 22 REBELS

MOSCOW – Chechen security forces killed 22 separatist rebels, including the alleged organizer of the assassination of the republic’s president, a top republic official said yesterday, according to news reports.

The deputy prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, was quoted as saying the rebels were killed in an operation in the Vedeno region, about 30 miles southeast of Grozny, the Chechen capital. The region’s slopes and forests provide considerable shelter for the insurgents.

Mr. Kadyrov is the son of Akhmad Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen president who was killed May 9 by a bomb at a stadium in Grozny.

The rebel death toll was one of the highest reported in recent months. The victims reportedly included Suleiman Khairulla, whom Mr. Kadyrov identified as a top lieutenant of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and the self-proclaimed organizer of the stadium bombing, news reports said.

“It was our revenge for the May 9 act of terrorism,” Mr. Kadyrov said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. At least four other people have been detained in recent months on suspicion of involvement in the bombing.

– Associated Press

REPORT: SREBRENICA MASSACRE PLANNED

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina – A Serb commission’s final report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre acknowledges that the mass murder of 7,800 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces was planned, an international official said yesterday.

The report on the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since World War II was presented to the Bosnian Serb government last month but has not yet been made public. “The report itself admits and provides details of the plan and deliberate liquidation of thousands of Bosniaks by the Bosnian Serb forces,” Bernard Fassier, the deputy to Bosnia’s top international administrator, Paddy Ashdown, told reporters.

Although Bosnian Serbs have long been blamed for the massacre, it was not until this past June – following the Srebrenica commission’s preliminary report – that Serb officials acknowledged that their security forces carried out the slaughter. The number of victims has long been disputed, with Bosnian Muslim officials claiming 8,000 men and boys were killed in Srebrenica. But Mr. Fassier said the commission found that 7,800 were killed after it compiled 34 lists of victims.

Nearly 1,200 Srebrenica victims have been identified through DNA analysis.

– Associated Press

CENTRAL ASIA

AFGHAN TERRORISTS SEEK PRISONER EXCHANGE

KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghan government ministries searching for three kidnapped U.N. workers have yet to receive a list of prisoners that Taliban-linked terrorists want released in return for the hostages’ lives, officials said yesterday.

Spokesmen for Jaish-al Muslimeen, or Army of Muslims, said Sunday that they had handed a list of 26 prisoners, some possibly in American custody at Guantanamo Bay, to government negotiators. But two government officials said yesterday that they had no word on any contact with the kidnappers and had not received any such list. “If they contact us directly, then we will consider it,” one official said on condition of anonymity. “Unless we have direct correspondence, we can’t act.”

The officials didn’t rule out that a handful of ministers and top aides were negotiating in secret. Annetta Flanigan of Northern Ireland, Angelito Nayan of the Philippines, and Shqipe Hebibi of Kosovo were abducted 11 days ago when armed men halted their marked U.N. vehicle in downtown Kabul.

Foreigners have been kidnapped in Afghanistan’s troubled south, but the abduction of the foreign aid workers was the first in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and it fanned fear that Afghan terrorists are copying their Iraqi counterparts.

– Associated Press

MIDDLE EAST

HEZBOLLAH SHOWS FOOTAGE OF DRONE IT SENT OVER ISRAEL

Hezbollah yesterday released footage of a drone aircraft it had sent into Israeli airspace a day earlier, a flight that the United Nations said violated the U.N.-drawn border between Lebanon and Israel.

The terrorist Shiite Islamic group said it had sent the “Mirsad 1” drone flying over Jewish settlements at a low altitude for 20 minutes Sunday before it returned to its base in response to repeated Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace.

The flight is believed to be the first hostile aerial incursion from Lebanon into Israel since Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command members flew over in a hang glider in 1987 and killed six soldiers before being shot dead. The information minister, Elie Firzli, defended Hezbollah’s incursion, calling it “an act of resistance.” But he said the group had not told Lebanese authorities about its plans to fly the plane.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV yesterday showed the first pictures of what appeared to be a drone with two rear tails flying low over a banana grove just across from a fence marking the Lebanese-Israeli border before returning to Lebanon, the announcer said. She added that the pictures from the 20-second film were the only images Hezbollah’s war press department permitted to be released. The footage revealed no details of the aircraft’s make. The drone was shown flying at fast speed and making a whizzing noise.

– Associated Press