Pakistani police have apologized to a German tourist after she was detained for two weeks for allegedly violating the terms of her visa, her lawyer said Wednesday.

Kim Laura Schweer was arrested on March 16 in the central town of Sakhi Sarwar, where she had gone to visit an annual festival in honor of a Sufi saint the town is named after, police official Rana Mohammad Asif said.

The German government agreed on Wednesday to send a frigate to take part in an international mission in the Mediterranean Sea to destroy Syria's chemical weapons.

Up to 300 German soldiers will take part in the deployment to help protect the U.S. vessel, MV Cape Ray, aboard which the weapons will be broken down at sea using hydrolysis.

An asylum seeker being deported on a flight from Germany on Tuesday forced the Lufthansa plane to turn back after threatening an air stewardess with a broken razor blade, police said.

The 28-year-old man from Kosovo did not want to be sent back to Hungary where he's seeking asylum, and forced the plane to return to Munich airport where he was arrested.

A German citizen held hostage in Yemen was shown on a private television channel Monday, the first time he has been seen since he was taken hostage two months ago in a tribal region.

Wearing dark glasses and a white robe traditional on the Arab peninsula, the man identified as Rudiger Schwidt appeared to have lost weight and, according to a reporter, is suffering from lung cancer and needs urgent treatment,

Russian President Vladimir Putin informed German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday about the partial withdrawal of troops he ordered from a region on the border with Ukraine, her office said.

"Moreover the two discussed further possible steps to stabilize the situation in Ukraine and Transdniestr," Moldova's largely Russian-speaking breakaway region, Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Monday compared Russia's seizure of Crimea to Nazi aggression in Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, according to a media report.

The outspoken veteran politician said Russian President Vladimir Putin's declared desire to protect Russians and Russian-speakers in Crimea was similar to how Hitler justified the Third Reich's expansionist drive.

German authorities arrested three people with alleged ties to a Syrian radical group Monday in police raids across the country, the federal prosecutor's office said.

Two of the suspects, a German and a Turk, are believed to have traveled to Syria last year and joined the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which German authorities consider to be a foreign terrorist organisation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to carry on the frequent "tough but constructive" contacts he has had with Chancellor Angela Merkel on the Ukraine crisis, his spokesman has told German TV.

Dmitry Peskov told ZDF television that the telephone talks between Putin and Merkel were worth their "weight in gold", according to excerpts released ahead of broadcast on "Berlin Direkt" later Sunday.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday that the Ukraine crisis underscored the need to protect the right of nations to map out their own future.

In an op-ed entitled "The right to choose", the outgoing secretary general called Russia's actions in Crimea a violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty, which undermined the rule of international law.

The European Union on Saturday signaled that it is ready to deploy its delayed peacekeeping force to help put down the escalating crisis in Central African Republic, after obtaining additional backing for the mission.

The troops were due to deploy last week, but there were insufficient soldiers for the mission and not enough aircraft at hand to transport them.