Gunmen linked to al-Qaida on Monday killed four soldiers in southern Yemen, a medic said, a day after at least 25 troops died in an air strike by government forces and other gunbattles.

Another four soldiers who were wounded in the latest clashes in the city of Zinjibar were in "serious condition," said the medic at a military hospital in Aden.

A group of Bahraini medics handed lengthy jail terms by a security court for trying to overthrow the regime will appeal their sentences in a civil court later this month, the prosecutor general has said.

"A session has been set for October 23 to look into the appeals," chief prosecutor Abdulrahman al-Sayyed said in a statement carried overnight by the official BNA news agency.

Iraqi forces retook control of a police headquarters in western Iraq on Monday after armed insurgents stormed it and took hostages in a two-hour siege that left the town's police chief dead.

Gunmen set off at least two explosions at around 10:00 am (07:00 GMT) before overrunning theal-Baghdadi police headquarters, which is in a compound that also houses the office of the town's mayor.

Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun’s son and history professor Mohammed al-Omar were killed on Sunday by “gunfire from a group of armed terrorists,” Syria's state news agency SANA reported.

Saria Hassoun and al-Omar were attacked while traveling in the professor's car on the Aleppo-Idlib road in northwest Syria, it said, after having earlier reported that the grand mufti's son was injured and was admitted to Idleb National Hospital.

Vandals torched a mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists that sparked a "furious" response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

The mosque, located in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria in the northern Galilee region, sustained heavy damage in the overnight attack, in which the arsonists scrawled the words "tag" and "revenge" on the walls.

Moammar Gadhafi's son, al-Saadi, denied allegations of corruption and intimidation and called Interpol's decision to put him on the equivalent of its most-wanted list political, according to an email sent Sunday.

Al-Saadi Gadhafi is under house arrest in Libyan neighbor Niger, where he fled after Tripoli fell to revolutionary forces. His father and two of his brothers are in hiding, presumably inside Libya, as fighting between revolutionary forces and Gadhafi's loyalists continues on three fronts.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday the Arab spring has left Israel "increasingly isolated" in the Middle East and that its military might could not make up for a weakened diplomatic position.

Speaking to reporters aboard his plane bound for Israel as part of a Middle East tour, Panetta said it was crucial for Israel to shore up its relations with Egypt and other countries in the region that had proved valuable partners in the past.

The Arab League appealed to member states Sunday to bolster financial help to the Palestinian territories after U.S. lawmakers froze about $200 million in aid in response to Palestinians' U.N. statehood bid.

"It is necessary for the member countries of the League to increase their financial aid to the Palestinian people so they can face this threat," said Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi after talks in Cairo with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat.

Ousted president Hosni Mubarak never told the army to open fire on demonstrators calling for an end to his rule, Egypt's military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi said on Sunday.

"The armed forces fight for Egypt and not for just anyone, whoever it may be," he said in a speech at a ceremony south of the capital.

Six hundred Tunisian illegal immigrants who arrived in Italy by boat have been deported in a week, the interior ministry announced Sunday.

They were put on several flights from Palermo, Sicily, under an agreement signed on April 5 between Tunis and Rome arranging the systematic deportation of Tunisians arriving illegally.