Saudi police exchanged fire with "masked gunmen" during a protest in the oil-rich east, killing one of them, state news agency SPA reported early on Saturday, in the second such incident in 24 hours.

Activists contacted by AFP from Dubai said that Zuhair al-Said, 21, was killed as security forces dispersed a protest on Friday against the death of another Shiite demonstrator the previous day.

Activists plan a day of civil disobedience in Egypt on Saturday to mark the first anniversary since they toppled Hosni Mubarak but left an increasingly unpopular but defiant military in charge.

The call for strikes in universities and workplaces comes after a series of protests pressuring the military to transfer power immediately to civilians, rather than wait for planned presidential elections later this year.

Egypt's ruling military said on the eve of the first anniversary of the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak that it will not bow to threats or plots against the state, official television reported.

"We will never yield to threats, and we will never give in to pressure," the much-criticized Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) said in a statement broadcast by the channel.

The Arab League is likely to appoint a special envoy to Syria at a meeting this weekend, a Western diplomat in London said on Friday.

Also on Friday, the opposition Syrian National Council, an umbrella body grouping parties in revolt against Bashar al-Assad's regime, said it expects to be recognized within days by several Arab states.

Armed Bedouins kidnapped three South Korean tourists and their Egyptian guide in the Sinai Peninsula on Friday in the latest in a spate of abductions in the region, a security official said.

The trio -- three women -- were returning from the historic monastery of St Catherine to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh when they were seized and taken off in a pickup, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Thousands rallied in the Yemeni capital on Friday to back a single-candidate presidential election planned for later this month that has sparked protests in the south, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

The demonstrators, who gathered in Sanaa's Change Square -- epicenter of a year of protests against veteran President Ali Abdullah Saleh -- chanted slogans in favor of the poll in which Vice President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi will be the sole candidate.

It was meant to be the historic trial of a dictator brought to justice by his long-suffering people, but the case against Egypt's ex-president Hosni Mubarak has verged on the farcical as prosecutors and lawyers struggle to rise to the occasion.

From the start of the trial on August 3, lawyers representing Mubarak's victims drained the proceedings of gravitas as they jostled for the chance to hold forth on live television.

A Turkish prosecutor has launched a probe after two Syrian refugees staying in a Turkish border camp were handed over to Syrian security forces, Anatolia news agency reported Friday.

Syrian dissident army colonel Huseyin Mustafa Harmus and Mustafa Kassum were taken out of a refugee camp in Altinozu, Hatay province, near the Syrian border and delivered to Syrian security forces "by force," said the prosecutor's office in southern Adana province, in a statement cited by Anatolia.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak approved the construction of buildings in the West Bank to serve as an educational facility for special-needs youth, his office said on Friday.

The site, named Gevaot and located in the Gush Etzion bloc, "is not a settlement nor is it new in the Gush Etzion regional council, and is part of Alon Shvut," a nearby settlement, the statement from Barak's office said.

Seven Iranian engineers kidnapped near Syria's embattled city of Homs in late December have been released, the official IRNA news agency reported Friday, quoting an informed source at the ministry of energy.

The seven were working at a power plant in Jandar, near Homs, the city in central Syria that has become one of the flashpoints in the uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.