Split Bosnian town holds first local election for 12 years

A viewpoint near the famous old bridge in Mostar (John Stillwell/PA)

Polls opened in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar for the first local election in over a decade in a city famed for its picturesque Ottoman architecture and its deep ethnic divisions.

Split between Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats, who fought fiercely for control over the city during the country’s 1992-95 war, Mostar has not held a local election since 2008, when Bosnia’s constitutional court declared its election rules to be discriminatory and ordered that they be changed.