A key Syrian opposition activist has left her homeland and is living in France, an online newspaper reported Saturday.

"I left Syria, in secret, at the request of the revolutionaries," Suhair al-Atassi told the website Mediapart.

Support for Newt Gingrich is soaring as South Carolina votes in its Republican presidential primary, according to a new poll Saturday that shows him with a commanding lead over longtime frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Former House speaker Gingrich has the support of 40 percent of likely Republican voters in the state's primary, compared to 26 percent for Romney, the American Research Group reported in its poll released as voters trudged to the polls in the southern U.S. state.

Gunmen killed four Iraqi soldiers in an attack in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad on Saturday, the provincial security command center said.

The attack took place at a checkpoint near a public park in the center of the city, 60 kilometers west of the capital, at around 6:45 pm (15:45 GMT), according to Major Yassin Mohammed in Anbar province operations center.

Divers searching an Italian cruise shipwreck found another body Saturday, bringing the death toll to 12, even as they hoped those missing may have miraculously survived in air pockets a week after the tragedy.

Coastguard divers discovered a woman's body towards the stern while searching previously inaccessible parts of the ship eight days after it hit rocks and keeled over on to its side off Italy's northwest coast.

French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said Saturday that the French soldiers killed in Afghanistan were shot dead by Taliban "infiltrated for a long time" in the ranks of the Afghan army.

Longuet made the comments during a meeting with General Nazar, commander of the 3rd Afghan army brigade at their main base in eastern Afghanistan.

Opposition Syrian National Council leaders on Saturday pressed the Arab League to turn the Syria crisis over to the U.N., but the League looked set to extend its own mission criticized for its failure to stem 10 months of killing.

SNC chief Burhan Ghaliun met Arab League head Nabil al-Arabi in Cairo and lobbied against the extension of the League's peace mission, SNC spokeswoman Basma Qadmani said.

The rebel Free Syrian Army, whose forces are present in Zabadani northeast of Damascus, fears a government offensive on the city after its forces withdrew several days ago, a spokesman said on Saturday.

Major Maher Nueimi told Agence France Presse by telephone from Turkey that the army had pulled back a few kilometers from the city near the Lebanese border "in what may have been a tactical retreat to prepare an attack."

Egyptian border police shot dead two African migrants and wounded a third as they tried to cross illegally into Israel early Saturday, security officials said.

Border police spotted the man and woman, whose nationality remains unknown, as they tried to climb over barbed wire along the frontier and fired on them after they refused to heed calls to stop.

Bomb attacks targeting security forces and gun battles killed at least 162 people in Nigeria's second-largest city of Kano, sources said, as bodies littered the streets on Saturday.

A curfew was imposed on Kano in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north after it exploded into violence on Friday evening, with eight police and immigration offices or residences targeted.

Angry protesters stormed the offices of Libya's National Transitional Council in the eastern city of Benghazi on Saturday after besieging the building for hours, an NTC member told Agence France Presse.

"The demonstrators attacked the building and turned NTC offices upside down," the official said on condition of anonymity.