Ankara  - Turkish investigators looking into reports that the bodies of several people murdered in the 1990s in south-east Turkey had been dumped into wells have discovered a human skull, Turkish media reported on Monday.

Digging around several wells in the district of Silopi, investigators found human hair, clothes, a military cap and various human bones.

Dozens of people went missing, presumably murdered, during the 1990s at the height of fighting between the separatist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish armed forces.

Ankara - Turkish warplanes bombed a number of suspected Kurdish separatist positions in northern Iraq on Thursday, the private NTV television broadcaster reported a military official as saying.

The jets bombed suspected bases in the Zap and Avasin regions just over the Turkish border with Iraq, General Metin Gurak told reporters in Ankara on Friday.

St Petersburg - Portugal defender Fernando Meira leaves Galatasaray Istanbul for Zenit St Petersburg with immediate effect, the UEFA Cup holders from Russia announced on Wednesday.

Zenit said on their website that Meira, 30, has signed a three-year-contract. The transfer fee has been estimated at 6 million euros (7.6 million dollars).

Meira joined the Turkish top club Galatasaray last summer after more than six years at Germany's VfB Stuttgart, but has fallen out of favour there recently.

Athens/Nicosia - Rival Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot leaders met for renewed unification talks on Wednesday, focussing on European issues, officials said.

The Mediterranean island has been divided since a Turkish invasion in 1974, with peace talks only resuming in September last year after being broken off in 2004.

The talks, in the buffer zone of Lefkosa in Cyprus, are being held under the aegis of the United Nations.

"The leaders have referred to technical experts who are in particular legal experts because there are some legal questions to be addressed," said UN special advisor Alexander Downer.

Ankara  - Fifty-six people suspected of involvement in a secular, ultranationalist plot to overthrow the Turkish government will face trial after prosecutors in Istanbul on Tuesday released a second indictment in the so-called Ergenekon probe.

The list of suspects, which includes two former generals, are suspected of being connected to the secretive Ergenekon coup plotters.

Ankara - Controversy erupted in Turkey on Tuesday after a science institute withdrew a planned cover story about evolution theory founder Charles Darwin from its magazine and sacked the publication's editor who had approved the article.

The television news channel CNN Turk, on its website, accused the state-run Turkish Science and Research Institute (TUBITAK) of "unbelievable censorship" in removing the planned cover story marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the the British scientist.