Residents of the battle-scarred town of Misrata voted on Monday to elect their local council, in Libya's first poll in more than 40 years and held four months after the killing of Moammar Gadhafi.

"This is an historic event. We hope these elections will be an example" for the rest of Libya, the president of the port city's electoral commission, Mohammed Balrouin, told Agence France Presse.

President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday that foreign parties were funding "armed terrorist groups" to destabilize Syria and intent on blocking any political solution, the state news agency SANA reported.

It said the embattled president made the accusation in a meeting with a visiting top Russian MP, Alexei Pushkov, head of the international affairs committee of Russia's lower house of parliament.

Violence killed 15 people across Syria on Monday as regime troops massed around Homs, sparking calls for women and children to flee the besieged flashpoint city, as Iranian warships docked at the port of Tartus in a show of force.

The reported buildup came as Mediterranean states meeting in Rome agreed to preserve Syria's territorial integrity and avoid an "Iraqi scenario," according to Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem.

Yemen's future president Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi has pledged to southern separatists and northern rebels that he will address their concerns, as fears mounted over election boycotts and escalating vote-related violence.

Both the separatist Southern Movement and the northern Shiite rebels are boycotting Tuesday's presidential vote, and attacks on polling stations and clashes between troops and anti-election protesters in the south have raised fears that polling day could be marred by violence.

Iraq's fugitive Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi said his bodyguards and other employees are being held in secret prisons and subjected to torture, in an interview broadcast on Monday.

Authorities have charged Hashemi, a Sunni, with running a death squad. He has been hiding out since December in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where the authorities have so far declined to hand him over.

Syria's opposition is expected to take part in an international conference in Tunis on Friday to which European Union and Arab League members as well as China, Russia and United States have been invited.

Speaking after a meeting of Mediterranean region foreign ministers in Rome on Monday, Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem also said the talks had agreed on the need to avoid "an Iraqi scenario" and preserve Syria's integrity.

Two Iranian warships have docked at the Syrian port of Tartus, state television reported on Monday, adding that their crew would be training Syrian sailors.

"The two ships, one which is a supply vessel and the other a destroyer have docked in Tartus, a port city north west of Damascus, and as per a bilateral agreement they will be involved in training the Syrian navy," the report said, without indicating when the vessels went into port.

Algeria has uncovered a large cache of weapons believed to originate from Libya, including dozens of shoulder-held missiles that can be used to shoot down airliners, newspapers said Monday.

According to the French-speaking el-Watan, 15 SA-24 and 28 SAM-7 Russian-made man-portable surface-to-air missiles were found at a location in the southern desert called In Amenas.

The Syrian authorities have freed blogger Razan Ghazzawi, symbol of an 11-month uprising, and six other female activists arrested last week, a human rights lawyer said on Monday.

The women were released on Saturday, but were ordered to report to police daily in order to continue their questioning, the lawyer, Anwar Bunni, told Agence France Presse.

Western support for Syrian rebels could trigger civil war in the violence-hit nation, an influential Chinese newspaper said Monday, as it defended Beijing's decision to veto a U.N. resolution.

The U.N. Security Council resolution, which condemned a crackdown on protesters by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, would have cornered Damascus and led to worse violence, said a front-page commentary in the People's Daily.