Former pro-Gadhafi fighter Milad Mohammed Youssef lifts his shirt to reveal scars from what he says are cigarette burns and chain beatings, claims his jailer denies happened at his prison.

Youssef, a prison inmate in the western city of Misrata, says he has been held in his small cell at the army-run facility since October 28, five weeks after being captured.

Representatives of Syria's Kurdish community are divided on the issue of seeking a foreign military intervention to help topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is trying to crush a popular uprising.

NATO-led forces, which carried out air strikes in Libya last year after popular protests gave way to an armed uprising, were instrumental in long-time strongman Moammar Gadhafi’s fall.

Disagreement on Syria is one underlying cause of the current diplomatic row between Iraq and Turkey, analysts say, but crucial economic ties are likely to prevent a serious escalation.

Despite improving relations and rising trade between their two countries in recent years, the rhetoric between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become heated in recent weeks as Baghdad grappled with a political crisis that has stoked sectarian tensions.

The Syrian authorities have agreed to an offer by Russia to have informal talks in Moscow with opposition representatives to resolve the crisis in the country, the Russian foreign ministry said Monday, an offer swiftly rejected by the opposition.

Russia had suggested to both the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition that they should meet in Moscow for "informal contacts" without any preconditions, the foreign ministry said.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is to head to New York on Tuesday to press the U.N. Security Council into taking action over the Syrian regime's "crimes against humanity", his ministry said.

Juppe will seek "to persuade the Security Council to assume its responsibilities faced with the Syrian regime's worsening crimes against humanity," ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said on Monday.

Security forces have executed Free Syrian Army colonel Hussein Harmush, a founder of the rebel group made up of soldiers who defected, the Syrian League for Human Rights said on Monday.

"An air force intelligence unit last week carried out a sentence to shoot dead officer Hussein Harmush," the non-governmental group said in a statement.

Iran has developed laser-guided artillery rounds designed to home in on stationary or moving targets at a distance of up to 20 kilometers (12 miles), Defense Minister Ahmed Vahidi told state media Monday.

State television showed images of artillery being fired, saying it showed the precision-guided ammunition in action.

Saudi Arabia beheaded a Pakistani man who was arrested as he tried to smuggle drugs into the ultra-conservative kingdom, the interior ministry said on Monday.

"Salman Khan Taj Mohammed, a Pakistani... was arrested as he was caught smuggling a large amount of heroin" into the country, the ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SPA.

The head of the world's largest Muslim body urged the international community on Monday to take up its responsibilities in protecting Syrian civilians and ending bloodshed there.

"I renew my calls to the international community, especially the U.N. Security Council, to take up its responsibilities in protecting civilians and taking all measures to end bloodshed in Syria," the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, told Agence France Presse.

At least 95 civilians, six members of the security forces, and two deserters were killed in violence across Syria on Monday, activists and a rights group said.

Security forces killed 95 people, including eight children and a woman, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.