SKOPJE (AP) - A series of crime-related, violent incidents have occurred in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) in the past several days, raising fears of renewed instability in the Balkan republic, police said yesterday. Police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska said that a fugitive suspect was killed and two police officers wounded in separate incidents. “The incidents indicate that someone wants to undermine Macedonia’s stability,” Konteska said. “There are still groups that want to undermine Macedonia for political or criminal reasons.” She did not elaborate on the identity of the groups.

VATICAN CITY (AFP) - Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov visited the Vatican yesterday to formally thank Pope John Paul II for absolving his country of involvement in the 1981 attempt to assassinate him. “I thank you with all my heart for effacing the stain of a Bulgarian connection that has done so much damage to my country,” Parvanov said after a 20-minute meeting held in return for a visit the pope made to Bulgaria in May last year.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson urged Bosnia to fix its “schizophrenic” military yesterday as he made his last visit to the war-torn country as head of the Euro-Atlantic alliance. Robertson told the Dnevni Avaz daily the system whereby Bosnia had two armies — one for the Serbs and one for the Muslim-Croat Federation — was “politically divided, economically exhausting and militarily useless.” “No country is able to maintain this kind of defense schizophrenia,” he said in a letter to the daily published ahead of his arrival. (AFP)

Lawyers for Bosnian-Serb General Radislav Krstic called yesterday for his conviction for genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre to be quashed and his 46-year jail sentence reduced. The slaughter of over 7,000 Muslims by Bosnian-Serb troops did not amount to genocide as the number of killed was too “insignificant” to speak of genocide, Krstic’s lawyers said. (AFP)