News in Brief

Kurds may free Turks: The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) may release Turkish state officials it is holding within 10 days as part of a renewed push for peace with Turkey, the cochair of the pro-Kurdish party said on Saturday.

“I hope the state officials held by the PKK will reach their families within a week or 10 days,” Gulten Kisanak of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. (AFP) Complaints thrown out: Egypt’s constitutional court on Sunday threw out complaints against an Islamist-dominated assembly that drafted the country’s divisive constitution, the official MENA news agency reported.

The complaints had challenged the method in which the members of the assembly had been chosen. The hastily prepared charter was passed in a referendum in December. (AFP) Clashes in Egypt: Protesters clashed with police Sunday in the Egyptian city of Port Said as the interior ministry decided to move 39 prisoners awaiting a verdict over alleged involvement in a deadly football riot, a security official said.

The verdict, expected next Saturday, is for the remaining defendants in a case which resulted in death sentences in January for 21 defendants, sparking clashes that killed at least 40 people. (AFP) Egypt found woman: A senior security official says a missing Muslim woman suspected of conversion to Christianity has been found. Her disappearance set off rioting in southern Egypt.

Muslims stormed a church in Kom Ombo, charging that the woman was being held there.

Major General Hassan AbdulHay, security chief of Aswan, told reporters late Saturday that “family and social reasons,” not religion, were behind her disappearance, and she had not converted. He gave no other details. (AP)