A Tunisian court cleared Libyan former prime minister Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi on Tuesday on a charge he had crossed illegally into Tunisia as he fled Libya last year, his lawyer said.

"The court ... has acquitted al-Mahmoudi and so we are demanding his immediate release," lawyer Mabrouk Kourchid said after the hearing in the southern city of Tozeur. "There is no legal reason to keep him in prison."

China will not protect the regime of Syria's President Bashar Assad, Premier Wen Jiabao said Tuesday, after Beijing drew international ire for vetoing a UN resolution on the country.

Wen's comments, during an EU-China summit, came after the United Nations' top human rights representative said the world body's inaction had "emboldened" the Syrian government to use overwhelming force against its own civilians.

China -- which drew global ire when it vetoed a resolution on Syria -- said Tuesday one of its diplomats met the Arab League head to discuss the crisis and another envoy would soon go to the Middle East.

China and Russia have faced a barrage of criticism for blocking a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the bloody crackdown on protests in Syria, including from Arab nations with which Beijing normally has good ties.

Yemen's army shelled al-Qaida positions in the southern city of Zinjibar on Tuesday, killing 12 of the extremists, a local government official told Agence France Presse.

"Twelve al-Qaida militants were killed when the army fired artillery shells and Katyusha rockets on their positions across several areas in Zinjibar," said the official in the adjacent town of Jaar, where the militants were buried.

Bahraini police dispersed protesters who made several attempts Tuesday to mark the anniversary of last year's uprising by marching to the site of the protest that was brutally crushed, witnesses said.

Several marches took off from Shiite villages on the outskirts of Manama hoping to reach the capital's Pearl Square, where democracy demonstrators camped out for a month last year before being forcefully driven out.

Iran has summoned Bahrain's envoy to Tehran to protest a demonstration outside its embassy in Manama on the anniversary of a Shiite uprising in the Gulf Arab kingdom, media reported.

"Iran has submitted an official protest to the Bahraini charge d'affaires over the gathering of a number of known people in front of the Iranian embassy in Manama who were shouting slogans against our nation's official," Iran's foreign ministry said in a quoted statement.

Suspected drug dealers have shot and wounded two undercover police officers during an arrest operation in Bani Yas, state news agency WAM reported Tuesday.

"A first lieutenant and his colleague, a staff sergeant, came under fire in Bani Yas from drug dealers as the police officers tried to arrest them" Monday evening in the town, west of Abu Dhabi city, WAM reported.

Nineteen people were killed across Syria on Tuesday, most of them civilians who died in the heaviest shelling of protest city Homs for days, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"The shelling of the Baba Amr neighborhood began at dawn and is the most intense in five days," the Observatory's Rami Abdel Rahman said, referring to the main rebel stronghold in Homs city.

A man was killed Tuesday when a bomb exploded as he was planting it in a polling booth in Yemen's southern city of Aden, a security official said, a week ahead of referendum-like presidential elections.

"An unknown man trying to plant an explosive device in a polling booth in the neighborhood of Crater... was killed when it exploded," the official said, requesting anonymity.

Indian investigators were searching Tuesday for the motorcycle assailant who attached a bomb to an Israeli diplomatic car in the heart of New Delhi, an attack the Jewish state blamed on Iran or its proxies, including Hizbullah.

Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters investigators were working on the assumption it was a terror attack carried out by a "very well-trained person."