World Scene

IRAN

Top officials threaten to quit over vote ban

TEHRAN — Four vice presidents and 12 ministers were among top Iranian officials threatening to quit if hard-liners do not reverse a ban on hundreds of reformists running in parliamentary elections, officials said yesterday.

And in a speech to state governors, who have also threatened to resign over the mass vetting of candidates, moderate President Mohammed Khatami hinted he may one day lead a mass walkout.

But the Guardian Council, an unelected hard-line watchdog body that has barred around half of 8,200 aspiring candidates for the Feb. 20 vote, said it would not bow to pressure as reformist legislators took their sit-in protest into a third night yesterday.

ITALY

Court ends immunity for Berlusconi

ROME — Italy’s Constitutional Court dealt Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi a severe setback yesterday by annulling a legal-immunity law that had blocked a trial where he is charged with bribery.

The decision means the high-profile case, frozen last June when parliament approved the law, will have to restart.

After more than a month of often-fraught deliberation, Italy’s supreme court said the legislation ran counter to the principle enshrined in the constitution that everyone was equal before the law.

UZBEKISTAN

37 killed in plane crash

TASHKENT — A Soviet-built Yak-40 airliner crashed yesterday as it approached the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, killing 37 persons, including a senior U.N. official.

The state-run UzA news agency said all on board — 32 passengers and five crew — were killed as the plane made its final approach before landing on a flight from Termez, on the Central Asian state’s border with Afghanistan.

In New York, U.N. officials said Richard Conroy, 56, the organization’s senior official in Uzbekistan, had been on board.

BRITAIN

Serial killer hangs himself in prison

LONDON — Britain’s worst mass murderer Harold Shipman, a family physician, hanged himself with a noose of bed sheets in his prison cell yesterday, on the eve of his 58th birthday, never having said what drove him to kill at least 215 of his patients.

Shipman, who became known as “Doctor Death,” was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2000 for the murder of 15 female patients between 1975 and 1998, and faced no prospect of parole. Two years later, an inquiry concluded he was responsible for the deaths by lethal injection of at least other 200 mostly female and elderly patients.

SRI LANKA

President admits quiet extension

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s president yesterday admitted holding an undisclosed swearing-in ceremony to extend her term in office for an extra year, deepening political woes that have plunged the country into uncertainty.

Chandrika Kumaratunga told a state television interview that her term will now end in 2006, although the country had been told at the time of her investiture in 1999 that it was for a six-year term ending in 2005.