July 24, 1993

One of Italy's best-known tycoons was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Milan apartment today as the country's huge and ever-broadening corruption investigation moved closer to the core of his business dealings. The police said they were treating the case as a suicide.

The Central Intelligence Agency's covert operations division will spend $55 million in a new effort to buy back more than 300 Stinger antiaircraft missiles it gave to guerrillas fighting the Soviet-backed Government of Afghanistan in the 1980's, Government and intelligence officials say. The effort reflects the agency's fear that it may be outbid by terrorists and hostile governments in the black market for the Stinger, a lightweight, shoulder-carried, highly accurate antiaircraft missile considered the best weapon of its kind, the officials said.

In a do-or-die move on which he staked his political future, Prime Minister John Major won a vote of confidence today that insured the British Parliament's final approval of the Treaty on European Union. With the vote, the so-called Maastricht Treaty to forge a closer economic and political union among the 12 countries of the European Community faces one last hurdle in Britain, a judicial review likely to be decided by August.

Serbian artillery batteries pounded wide areas of Sarajevo today in a sustained offensive that raised concerns that Serbian commanders may be trying to seize the strategic western districts of the city. The Serbian attack on Sarajevo, the most intensive since last fall, sent the new United Nations Commander in Bosnia, Lieut. Gen. Francis Briquemont of Belgium, on a hasty trip into the mountains south of Sarajevo for a meeting with the Serbian military commander, Lieut. Gen. Ratko Mladic. General Mladic told reporters after the meeting that his troops would observe a cease-fire beginning at 10 A.M. on Sunday, but United Nations officers cautioned that there was no guarantee that Bosnian forces, driven back by the latest Serbian attacks, would agree to a truce.

A few of the middle-class teen-agers in baggy shorts and backwards baseball caps smoking cigarettes on the lawn behind Mark Twain Junior High School were quick to claim membership in a street gang. "Ooh, ooh, I'm in one!" said George Clementi, a 14-year-old in a Looney Tunes T-shirt. Actually, he said, he belongs to two groups, the Crime Related Artists and the United Crime Kings.