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GUILTY OF WAR CRIMESA Bosnian Serb pleaded innocent at The Hague to one of the most horrifying war crimes judged by the Yugoslav tribunal ...

GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES
A Bosnian Serb pleaded innocent at The Hague to one of the most horrifying war crimes judged by the Yugoslav tribunal so far the burning alive of 135 Muslim men, women and children trapped inside two homes. Dressed in a black T-shirt, Mitar Vasiljevic leaned forward on his knuckles and repeated the Serbian words for “not guilty” as an Australian judge David Hunt read out the 14 counts of extermination, murder, persecution and violence to life and property.

If convicted, the 45-year-old faces a life sentence in a European prison. No date has been set for his trial. The pre-trial hearing at the UN tribunal was Vasiljevic’s first public appearance since NATO troops arrested him on Tuesday in the southeastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, the site of the mass murder.

According to prosecutors, Vasiljevic worked as a waiter until the outbreak of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, when he joined a Bosnian Serb paramilitary group called the White Eagles.

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FOUND AFTER NINEYEARS
A 19-year-old Japanese woman was rescued after more than nine years of confinement at her abductor’s home, and reunited with her family, police said on Saturday. “She said she had never Left the second floor of the man’s home during all those years,” said the police official in Niigata, Central Japan. The woman, whose name is withheld by the police, went missing in November 1990.

She was found on Friday when hospital officials visited the home of the 37-year-old man to take him into custody at the request of his mother, who said he was “acting strangely,” according to the official. “His mother was surprised to hear that the girl was living in their house as she had never met her,” said the official, who identified himself as the deputy head of the section dealing with the case. “The woman also said she had never met his mother.” The woman was reunited with her family at a nearby police station later, he said.

GERMAN PRINCE WILL BE SUED
The German disco owner allegedly beatenby Princess Caroline’s husband said in Mombasa, Kenya, on Friday that he would sue `punching prince’ Ernst-August of Hanover over the incident on the Kenyan island of Lamu earlier this month. Joe Brunnlehner made the announcement in a statement released here through his lawyers.

The statement described Ernst-August as a `punching prince’ who had turned to `a cheap gimmick to paint a picture of innocence upon a person who is from a royal family but behaves in a manner totally opposed to his status’. This was an apparent reference to full-page advertisements the prince took out in leading newspapers in Paris, London and Nairobi in order to `establish the truth’. While some of the ads fell short of an outright denial of the prince’s involvement in an `altercation’ with Brunnlehner, they all denied allegations that the prince was accompanied by gangsters.