Polling stations closed on Sunday evening across Kosovo in an election whose outcome remains hard to call owing to the tight competition between the main parties.

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo claimed victory in parliamentary polls to secure a third term in office despite a low turnout at Sunday’s vote.

With elections approaching on Sunday, authorities in Pristina have increased measures in order to prevent poll fraud.

The prosecutor told the UN that there was still a huge backlog of war crimes cases from the Bosnian conflict and progress towards clearing them by the 2023 deadline was unacceptably slow.

The grim business of destroying the corpses of thousands of cattle and other livestock, killed in the recent floods, is drawing to a close in Bosnia.

Former Bosnian Army soldier Edin Dzeko was jailed for 12 years over the killings of six Croat fighters and a civilian couple in the village of Trusina near Konjic in 1993.

The House of Peoples of the Bosnian Parliament has finally adopted a law on anti-money laundering – bowing to EU threats – but it has yet to agree on changes needed to criminal law.

Former Bosnian Serb policeman Dragomir Andan testified that his military leader Ratko Mladic told him in 1992 that his biggest problem was fighting to rein in paramilitary groups.

Dario Kordic, former leader of the self-proclaimed wartime statelet called the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna, was released after serving 17 years of his war crimes sentence.

Goran Zubac, the director of the State Investigative and Protection Agency, was charged with failing to deal with violent unrest during mass protests in Bosnia in February.